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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And today’s that day!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I went with two different options (for two different sets of data).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 I made sure it was the H1 on the page). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n
EDIT: This post has brought up some really interesting conversations inside our group. It’s become clear that there is some real misunderstanding on semantic HTML and heading tags. Kevin Powell has an amazing<\/strong> video on this topic, so if you want to learn more about headings (and how they should be used) check out this video:<\/p>\n\n\n