Search visibility of website that only uses H2 tags - will not having H1 damage my visibility?

[twofourseven]

Excuse the basic question. I host my domain and website on Squarespace. I use a specific theme and after doing a site crawl of my site Moz picked up that Pages and Blog posts 'Missing or Invalid H1' tags (450 issues!). I discovered that my Squarespace theme only using H2 tags.

Is this a serious issue that affects my search visibility? What would you recommend that I do to fix this, if anything? I'm starting some SEO and lnikbuilding, but wanted to see if this is an issue that I need to consider.

Thanks!!!!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Julio,

The fact that your site is 'just' missing H1s and likely only using H2 shouldn't be too big of an issue. I'd say that Google is smart enough to notice that you basically would use the H2 instead of the H1 everywhere. However, I would make sure that the use of the H2 is not overdoing it. If you have 6171 H2s on your page then obviously its value is minimal. It's in the end, all about the proper use of these tags, and in that case, it shouldn't matter if there is no use of the H1 tag.

Martijn.

[Chris.Menke]

I agree with Martijn,

These days, heading tags don't do much. More important, I'd say, are the actual words you use in those lines that contain heading tags. The beginning of the first like (like where an h1 tag would be) should include your most important words. The beginning of the following paragraph (like where a page intro/summery following an h1 tag would be) should round out/expand on that vocabulary. The following headings and paragraphs should reinforce the vocabulary of the first paragraph.

Too often, the fluff that people produce for website copy gives them little to no relevance to their desired theme/topic.

[Alexrobi]

Hi, using a proper site structure is necessary for the health of websites. If you need more stress on your keyword and want to understand your content better to google then you need to have proper site structure. Follow this site structure, I found it very helpful. https://vrltrackings.com/

[sean-parnell]

Why would you not have the main heading of your pages be an H1?

Yes, your rankings will suffer though you will never know by how much unless you change them to H1 and measure the difference - though the difference will be affected by other things you do and overall traffic, so it's never an apples-to-apples comparison.

H1 headings have more SEO weight than any other content on the page including H2 and other headings. That is why Moz reports missing H1 headings.

Plus, you want to use H2, H3, and other headings to break up long content (>400 words or so) so visitors can scan the page to see if it's relevant and worth reading.

[Vanderlindemedia]

Ive build a nummerous amount of websites over the last few years. Bin in an argument with a client who's pretty much into marketing and seo himself. H1 or H3 was missing, but H2 was widely used. We've tested this out and our conclusion was this:

It really dont matter if you have good content + quality incoming links. Hell even quality links rank sites that are stuffed with copy content. We saw no difference in months when switched to a more structured H1/H2/H3. To this day good quality links or a well optimized incoming link pattern still beats everything of the above. No matter if you have a slow loading site or completely failing W3C validator etc.

I had the same 'warning' in Moz as well; but alot of the pages still are within the top 3 or so so i dont really think this is an issue for it not to rank.

[FranklinRoosevelt]

Well, It is not a big issues these days. Google is smart enough. I totally agree with martin in this.  Secondly, your title of the post would automatically be in H1 which would fulfill the requirements of having H1 tag in the post.

However, the thing which matters a lot is the on-page SEO of your site. On-page SEO of your website should be perfect.

Like your main keyword should be in H2, and all other headings which you consider important must be in H3 or H4 whatever you want as per your website's design. Moreover, do not forget to add Schema ( Google Structure Data to your site ).

I have done on-page SEO of my website properly, and have achieved good rankings after the google core may update.

[Vanderlindemedia]

Hi Sean.

We tested this on a website that recieves 1500 clicks a day by google. We waited pretty much months and saw no difference in "performance". Read my initial response to this:

[innovaxis-marketing]

There are too many other factors to be able to do a before and after test.

It's still the right thing to do for visitor ease-of-use and legibility.

There is no downside to doing it - only upside.

[Vanderlindemedia]

Obviously. But from my experience there was'nt really an upside to it. Basicly saying i might as well create a website with only H2 instead of the H1 till H6.