What is an H1 tag?
It's the main headline of a page — the single <h1> that tells both visitors and search engines what the page is about. Missing, doubled, or buried, it's one of only a handful of findings our engine scores as an outright error — and 22 of the 28 real sites in our corpus have the problem. Check in 30 seconds: right-click the page → View page source → search for <h1. Zero matches, or five? Both are problems.
The audit checks this on every page it crawls — up to 25 pages — and names every offender in the report.
The definition, in plain English
<h1>…</h1> — that marks a page's primary headline: the topic statement everything else on the page hangs from. Browsers render it as the biggest text; screen readers announce it first; search engines weight it heavily when deciding what the page is about. The rules are one H1 per page, placed at the top of the main content, describing that page's actual topic. A missing H1 leaves the page topic unstated; multiple H1s blur it — both show up in every serious audit, which is why our engine scores them as an error, not a suggestion.
What our engine actually checks
Rule core/h1 · severity: error · flagged on 22 of the 28 real audits behind our statistics page
On every crawled page the engine extracts the heading structure and validates the H1 specifically: present or absent, exactly one or several, and whether it has actual text (an H1 wrapping only an image with no alt text counts as missing). Findings list the affected URLs, and the pattern is usually template-level — a whole page type shipped without a headline.
In the corpus: 22 of 28 sites failed the H1 check, making it the most frequent outright error after meta descriptions. The commonest causes are design themes that style the logo as an H1 on every page, and CMS themes that drop the H1 entirely in favour of a styled div.
Why it matters, honestly sized
An H1 is a relevance signal for the page's main keyword — missing or duplicated, the page competes with a weaker hand, because the strongest on-page topic statement is either absent or split across competing phrases. It's rarely fatal on its own; it's a tax on every other thing you do right.
The human cost is real too: the H1 is often the first thing a screen-reading visitor hears and the anchor a skimming visitor looks for. Pages without one read as walls of same-sized text. And because it's an error in our scoring, an H1 problem drags the site's overall grade down even when everything else is fine.
The fix, step by step
- Find the gaps: view-source on each template — home, a service page, a blog post — and search
<h1. Count them; note which templates have zero or several. - Write one H1 per page that states the page's topic plainly: "Emergency Plumber in Leeds — 24/7 Callout", not "Welcome to our website". It should align with the title tag and the page's main heading needs, slightly more descriptive than the title.
- Fix the template, not thirty pages. In most CMSs the H1 lives in the page template or the page's title field. If your theme renders the logo as an H1, demote the logo to a div — the logo is not the headline.
- Demote extras to H2/H3. Multiple H1s become subheadings; keep the hierarchy logical underneath (one H1, then H2 sections, H3 subsections).
- Never leave an image-only H1 without alt text — for both the crawler and screen readers, text or alt text must carry the words.
What the £7.99 report checks — and what it can't
Everything here that can be checked from outside your site is mechanical, and mechanical is checkable. Full disclosure: some of it isn't, and we say which. The report is the full 21-category audit — what it costs and how it compares to doing it yourself are on their own pages.
The mechanical half
Checked across up to 25 pages per audit, with every offending page named and the exact fix spelled out.
- H1 presence on every audited page — including image-only headlines with no alt text
- multiple-H1 detection per page
- heading-order sanity across the page (H1 → H2 → H3, no skipped levels)
- title-tag and meta description alignment in the same pass
— Not ours to claim
What no report sold from outside your site can do:
- The report checks structure mechanically: presence, uniqueness, order. It won't write your headlines — an H1 can be present, unique and bland. The fix list flags every page and template that needs one; choosing the words is the human half-hour.
Fair questions, straight answers
Can a page have more than one H1?
Technically HTML5 allows it, and Google says it handles multiple H1s — but every audit standard, screen-reader convention and SEO practitioner treats one H1 per page as correct. Multiple H1s usually happen by accident (a theme styling the logo as H1, plus the real headline), and they dilute the page's topic statement. Demote the extras; keep exactly one.
Should the H1 be the same as the title tag?
Similar, not identical. The title tag competes in search results and should sell the click; the H1 confirms to arriving visitors they're in the right place. Same core keyword, different phrasing is the pattern — e.g. title "Emergency Plumber Leeds | 24/7 | Acme" and H1 "24/7 Emergency Plumber in Leeds".
Does the H1 help SEO rankings directly?
It's a relevance signal: the H1 is one of the strongest on-page statements of what a page is about, and engines weight it more than body text. But it's not a lever you pull for a rank boost — it's table stakes. A missing H1 weakens the page's case; a good one lets everything else you've done count fully.
My site builder has an H1 setting — where is it?
In WordPress the post/page title becomes the H1 automatically (if the theme is built correctly — check the theme isn't also making the logo an H1). Squarespace, Wix and Shopify map the page's "title" field to the H1; the trap is banners built as styled text blocks, which render as divs and leave the page headline-less. View-source settles it in seconds.
Find out which of your pages have no headline.
Enter your URL and pay securely — your report PDF lands in your inbox in ~30 minutes,
with H1s, heading order, titles and descriptions checked page by page.