H2's are already ranking well. Should I rock the boat?
-
I recently began work for a company and discovered that they are not using h1's (using h2's) and rank in the top 5 for ~90% of their keywords.
The site is one of the original players in their industry, has massive amounts of domain authority and tens of thousands of linking root domains. However, they are currently being beaten on some of their top keywords by a few of their younger competitors.
Moving their current h2 text into h1 tags could be helpful. But to what extent? Since they already rank well for so many competitive keywords, Is it worth it to rock the boat by moving their h2 text into h1 tags and risk affecting their current rankings?
-
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question Claudio.
-
Thanks for taking the time to detail your explanation, Nakul. Your method is a good one for testing. Cheers!
-
Thanks for your feedback and experience Mark. I appreciate it.
-
I really appreciate your encouragement, Brad. Your experience provides me with some hope of further boosting organic rankings and besting the competition. Thanks for sharing.
-
I've been doing SEO for a decent amount of time. You would think I would remember "when in doubt, test it out."
It's funny how when you're in the thick of things that the most obvious of answers can elude you.This is why I love the Moz community. Thanks for the reminder Ade!
-
I agree with all of the others especially about testing on a few keywords that are not mission critical.
My experience and past sites I have optimized are not affected much by H2 tags. The main factors that really made a difference were the title tags, H1, page interlinking using anchor text (not over-optimized - vary it).
There are 200+ (from the last info I heard) ranking factors. Obviously having all of these work together in synergy is best.
The good news you already have domain authority etc. I would think that it definitely won't hurt and may even help slightly.
-
Hi Collin,
I recently did this for a client site of mine (alas it didn't have a huge amount of domain authority). The results were very pleasing, we noticed a jump in keywords simply from switching from H2 to H1.
My advice - definitely go ahead with testing like the others have suggested. You've got nothing to lose!
Thanks,
Brad
-
Dear Collin,
I agree 100% with my mates, but I want to add some of my experience, for years I was doing this :
1. the exactly content of your title tag (I assume you're using your most important keywords) should be in the H! tag and this H1 tag should be as close to tag as is possible (prominence) you can use only one H1 tag on the page.
2. The use the H2 tag is optional and you can use it two or more times (no bother), usually I use two H2 tags with keywords related to my H1 (main keyword).
In the past months I was feeling the H2 is not important as in the past, and google now disagree with "over optimization" thats mean "pages with perfect keywords distribution, prominence and density".....
So you should use your primary keyword in the title tag and H1 tag and optionally H2 tags, the key is original and useful content for visitors.
Hope this help
Claudio
-
I agree with Ade. Just test it on a small scale and see what the results look like. I would suggest you try a couple different options.
1. Keywords Currently in Positions 2-5
2. Keywords Currently in Positions 6-10
3. Keywords Currently on Page 2
Find 5 in each category, make the changes and watch and see where the most impact was and make sure you are not directly impacting the test with any other items of influence (as much as you can control) to get an accurate read on the test.
-
Hi Colin,
Why don't you take it slowly and carry out some testing?
I would choose a few pages where they are ranking well for some (not so important) keywords and switch these titles to H1's, leave it for a few weeks and see how it goes.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Specifying Your Organization's Logo Schema Required If Corporate Contacts Schema is in Place?
Does anyone know if specifying the organization's logo schema is required if corporate contacts schema is in place? I have the corporate contact schema in place on my site but not the second one. The site is http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ Thanks,
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Drupal's Yoast
Hi. I'm wondering if anyone knows of an equivalent to Yoast for Drupal sites? Is there such a thing? I've been asked whether I could optimize a Drupal site and am wondering if the guiding principles and techniques I use for HTML and Wordpress sites can be easily transferred to a Drupal implementation, or whether I might be setting myself (and the client!) up for failure. Any observations or advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | DonnaDuncan0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
What's the best Blogging platform
A year ago an SEO specialist evaluated my Wordpress site and said she had seen lower rankings for Wordpress sites--in general. We moved our site off any cms and design in html 5. Our blog, however, is still on Wordpress. I'm thinking about moving to the Ghost platform b/c I only a blog. The drawbacks are one author, no recent post lists, no meta tags. Is it worth it to move the site off Wordpress. Will it affect my rankings much if I have great content? Does anyone have experience with or opinions on Ghost?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Robots.txt crawling URL's we dont want it to
Hello We run a number of websites and underneath them we have testing websites (sub-domains), on those sites we have robots.txt disallowing everything. When I logged into MOZ this morning I could see the MOZ spider had crawled our test sites even though we have said not to. Does anyone have an ideas how we can stop this happening?
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Does a CMS inhibit a site's crawlability?
I smell baloney but I could use a little backup from the community! My client was recently told by an SEO that search engines have a hard time getting to their site because using a CMS (like WordPress) doesn't allow "direct access to the html". Here is what they emailed my client: "Word Press (like your site is built with) and other similar “do it yourself” web builder programs and websites are not good for search engine optimization since they do not allow direct access to the HTML. Direct HTML access is needed to input important items to enhance your websites search engine visibility, performance and creditability in order to gain higher search engine rankings." Bots are blind to CMSs and html is html, correct? What do you think about the information given by the other SEO?
Technical SEO | | Adpearance0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Are URL's with trailing slash seen as two different URLs
Hello, http://www.example.com and http://ww.example.com/ Are these seen as two different URL's ? Just as with www or non www ? Or it doesn't make any difference ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050