One clear main heading

A visitor decides in a few seconds whether they are in the right place. "Welcome" does not say what you do. "Painter in Sundsvall" does.

Google weighs the heading more than the body text when deciding what the page is about. The words in the h1 are the words you want to be found for.

Several h1s on one page is often a sign of a theme that marked the logo and the menu as headings. Then they compete with your real heading.

• Read your main heading as a stranger would. Is it clear what you do and where?
• Rewrite it as service plus town. The company name is already in the logo.
• If the page has several h1s, ask whoever built the site to make the others h2 or plain text. The look can stay. It is the markup that counts.
• One heading per page, and different headings on different pages.

The headings line up in my builds: one h1 per page that says what the page is about, and the rest in order below it. See what it costs.

A common situation is that the largest text on the page is the word Welcome, or the company name once more, right under the logo where the name already sits. The visitor has to hunt for what the company does, and that hunt takes longer than their patience lasts.

The checker counts how many main headings the page has. Exactly one is green. Several give amber, none at all gives red. The check carries 10 of 100 points. What the heading says is not judged, so a page can go green with the heading Welcome.

Several main headings on one page nearly always come from the theme, not from whoever wrote the text. The logo, the menu or a section heading has been marked up as a main heading in the code although it is not one, and they then compete with the real heading over what the page is about.

The correction is rarely visible in the design. Headings can change their markup in the code and keep the same size and colour on screen. It is the markup Google reads, not how large the text looks.

What is the difference between the main heading and the page title?

The title shows in Google's results and in the browser tab. The main heading shows on the page itself. They may well say roughly the same thing, but they are two different lines in the code.

Can I have several large headings on one page?

Yes, as long as only one of them is marked as the main heading in the code. The others become subheadings and can look exactly as large.

Should the company name be the main heading?

The name is usually in the logo at the top already. The main heading does more good if it says what you do and where, because that is what a new visitor is wondering.