What do web agencies use for the H1 on their home page?

A few weeks back I was talking to one of my buddies in the group who was workshopping different ideas for the H1 of his agency's home page.

I told him that one day I wanted to scrape a bunch of agency websites and see what kinds of things are popular, if there are any trends, or find some inspiration.

And today's that day!

My Process for Scraping

Since the H1 of the home page could have a pretty healthy impact on the rankings in search engines, I didn't want to use Google search to find my list of agencies. I knew that depending on what search term I used, that would greatly affect the data I collected.

So, I went with two different options (for two different sets of data).

The Admin Bar Job Board Directory

The TAB Job Board Directory was a quick and easy place to scrape together about 100 different agency websites, since I already had a list of the URLs .

I went through these websites one-by-one collecting the H1 tag from their home page (and no, I didn't just grab the “biggest” headline — I made sure it was the H1 on the page).

Google Business Profile

Since the Job Board is a pretty niche set of data (all WordPress-focused agencies), I wanted to get some more broad results. Instead of turning to Google search, I used Google Business Profiles since that would rely less on “keywords” and more on the category of business they had listed in their profile.

To get a wider swath of data I took ~10 results from major markets across the globe including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, London, and Sydney.

The H1 Data

Later in the article (make sure to read through to the end) I will give some additional commentary on what I found (which was quite shocking), but first, let's take a look at the data.

The Admin Bar Job Board Directory

These results are in no particular order, however I did remove any of the H1's that included the company name, just for anonymity's sake (and since that didn't seem to be super helpful anyway).

Major Market Google Business Profile

For the major market category, I put in every H1 I found for the top ~10 results in each market (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, London, & Sydney).

Interesting Tidbits

There were a couple things I found pretty interesting doing this research.

A lot of poor HTML structure exists

I was absolutely shocked at how many sites I visited had some pretty fundamental flaws in the HTML structure, including:

• No H1
• Multiple H1's (one site has 16)
• Other heading levels before their H1
• H1's that have zero relevance to their work
• Using <br> tags in the middle of their headline with no spaces, creating words to run together in the code.

We're not talking about a few here or there — I would say at least 50% of the sites I visited had some obvious issues (this number was much higher (like 80%+ of them) on the TAB Directory than it was in my Google Business Profile search).

Creative VS Factual

It was pretty interesting how many people took a “marketing” angle to their H1, using fancier language to try and appeal to their visitor, while others took a much more matter-of-fact approach with H1's like “Web Design”.

Which is the right way to go? Well, I'm not going to claim to be an SEO expert and I don't know your business — so it's hard to say!

A lot of agencies don't acquire much business from organic results (where the H1 might have more impact), but rely on referrals and word-of-mouth.

But this creates an interesting chicken or the egg conundrum… Does the H1 not matter so much, since things aren't coming from search? Or, if their H1's were better optimized for search, perhaps they would get more organic traffic?

🤔 🤷

What should your H1 be?

All of this data and research is purely anecdotal — and I'm not sure there is any clear answer. But maybe this post makes you think twice about yours and gives you some inspiration on finding what works best for you!

Here's what ahrefs has to say on the topic, which is (obviously) going to be a lot more authoritative than our general banter.

You might be in a position where you need to attract more visits to your website — in which case, a more factual and straight to the point H1 might be best.

Or, you might be more worried about the impression of the visitor because you already have reliable traffic sources or rankings.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this — so hop on into the group and share in this dedicated thread about this post.