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
-
Can anyone tell me - in layman's terms - any SEO implications of a Netscaler redirect?
We are in the midst of exploring the best options for developing a "microsite" experience for a client and how we manage the site - subdomain vs. subdirectory... Netscaler redirect vs DNS change. We understand that a subdirectory is best for SEO purposes; however, we anticipate technical limitations when integrating the different hosting platforms and capabilities into the existing site. The proposed solutions that were provided are a netscaler redirect and/or dns changes. Any experience with these solutions?
Technical SEO | | jgrammer0 -
What was the Google 'update' on 31st March?
Hi all. I looked back and saw that there was an update shown in 'Search Analytics' in Webmaster Tools a few weeks before the Mobile algorithm update. Not been able to find any mention of it and what it did so thought I'd check in here. ps. Also, this is a 90 day stretch and shows that our rankings have taken a hit since the mobile algorithm update. Interesting stuff (see image below) 4rJMU9e.jpg?1
Technical SEO | | RobFD0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
Weird problems with google's rich snippet markup
Once upon a time, our site was ranking well and had all the markups showing up in the results. We than lost some of our rankings due to dropped links and not so well kept maintenance. Now, we are gaining up the rankings again, but the markups don't show up in the organic search results. When we Google site:oursite.com, the markups show up, but not in the organic search. There are no manual actions against our site. any idea why this would happen?
Technical SEO | | s-s0 -
Fluctuation in Ranking for the keywords
We were ranking well for most of the keywords.These keywords were at first page i.e mostly @ 1st and 2nd position in Google.But we have put the following tag ie no index tag for our pages by mistake and after that the ranking fluctuated & fell down in Google search results as our pages were out of index in Google .We have removed the noindex tag after encountering the problem.Now I can see my pages are cached & indexed in Google after submitting to index in Google webmaster tool.Can I regain my ranking for the keywords and within how many days I would regain my previous ranking?
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Should I use my competitor's name in my content to help my rankings?
If I have a competitor that ranks higher than me, would it be helpful to use their name in my content, or in my meta information?
Technical SEO | | greaterstudio0 -
Google PR Rank Question (s)
Hi
Technical SEO | | damientown
My Google PR rank is still 1/10 (www.abouttownmarketing.com) after 12 weeks of daily SEO work building what I thought were quality back links. Does anyone know how often Google updates its PR rank? Also is it a linear measure or link adwords quality score is it exponential?
Many thanks
Damien0