Multiple H1s and Header Tags in Hero/Banner Images

[UWPCE]

I work on education websites, and our sites are being flagged by SEO and accessibility checkers for having multiple H1s.

The home pages have the site name as an h3 in the hero image, and an aspirational headline (think: Be Like Mike) as an H1. The sub-pages have two H1s: one on the site name in the banner image, and the other on the page title.

Note that the site name is very keyword-rich.

If we were to remove the H1 and H3 tags from the hero/banner images, would it do any SEO harm? At the same time, we’d rewrite the H1 on the home page to be more keyword-focused.

Any other options? I also read that it’s OK to have multiple H1s as long as it’s clear which H1 belongs to the heading area and which one belongs to the body area of the page.

Thanks in advance!

[terentyev]

@uwpce one more thing to keep in mind - coherence of H1 with meta title and description tags. These two things are often disregarded by webmasters, but these are important to give Googlebot a better picture of what this page is about. So:

• one H1 tag
• this H1 tag corresponds to your meta title
• meta description is a keyword rich summary of the page that will help your CTR on Google.

[judieboscopqk78]

@uwpce you should re-decentralize H tags, use only 1 H1 tag, the rest you should adjust to H2, H3, H4 accordingly.

[UWPCE]

@seoelevated thank you!

[seoelevated]

While there is some level of uncertainty about the impact of multiple H1 tags, there are several issues about the structure you describe. On the "sub-pages", if you have an H1 tag on the site name, that means the same H1 tag is used on a bunch of pages. This is something you want to avoid. Instead, develop a strategy of which pages you would like to target to rank for which search queries, and then use the page's primary query in the H1 tag.

The other issue I see in your current structure is that it sounds like you have heading tags potentially out of sequence. Accessibility checker tools will flag this as an issue, and indeed it can cause frustration for people with vision disabilities accessing your pages with screen readers. You want to make sure that you preserve a hierarchy where an H1 is above the H2 is above the H3, etc.