H1s are a stronger signal than H2s. However, we’d like to see if you can equal or possibly surpass the “value” or “strength” of an H1 with multiple H2s.
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What I am focusing in on tests 131, 132, and 133 is what might be called an economy of ranking signals. We know from testing that there are four signals that are continuously strong. You have your H1, meta-title, URL, and the body content and those always win when we are running head to head tests. Then there are all the other signals – your h2s, h3s, h4s, image alt, bold, italic, anchor text, those sort of things.
What we are looking at though is, does Google see this as kind of an economy? In a sense, can you trade one for the other or if you have one H1 and in this case, H2s, can you outrank an H1 with a certain number of H2s? For example, can two H2s beat an H1 or can three H2s? What we are looking at then in these tests is to set up a way to identify what that economy might be or even if this is how it works, in the first place.
This is a common problem that comes up especially when you jump into a website with a client and they have already built it and you are looking at it and you see that there is no H1 on the page and they decide they didn’t want it for design purposes – could you make it up with H2s, for example?
In this situation, what we did is set up five test pages in the normal way and then we added h2s to the test pages and then to the ones ranking 1, 2, 4, and 5 were H1s. Immediately, as soon as the H2s were added in vs the H1s, predictably, the H2 page dropped to the bottom.
At this point, the idea is that we will continue to add H2s until it rises to the top. So that we did not mess up keyword density or word count if those were possibilities here, instead of adding another H1, we wanted to make sure that the word count remains the same, just a line of text was added so in a sense the keyword density and word count remains the same.
As we continued to add H2s, the test page would never rise and ended up sticking to the number 5 spot all the way to the very end. We got to the point where we got to 6 H2s on the page and it simply would not move up. What I think we saw here was we got to the point of over-optimization, in a sense, in actuality.
We had so many h2s on the page as a strong ranking signal that we ended up over-optimizing our page before we could overtake the H1. We could not beat the H1 with H2s. This test was run three times and the results were consistent every time.
What this tells me in this situation is when you are in a situation where you are facing an H1, I do not think you can trade any number of H2s for an H1. H1, the metatitle, the body content, the URL are kind of in a category all on their own and you probably could not overtake that in terms of a straight one to one with a lesser signal.