H1 headlines are an extremely important part of law firm SEO and are crucial for getting your website to rank on Google, especially in more competitive niches such as the legal industry.
But firstly, what is an H1 headline?
H1 is the HTML code of the headline, and you can have H2, H3 etc headlines as well. Normal content text is normally <p> format which means paragraph.
Basically this is a way to organise the content on a page in a hierarchy, and Google uses this to find out what your page is about.
The H1 title is so important because it is the highest priority text on the page, and Google places a lot of importance on it, and in turn the keywords that are contained within it.
That means that if you want to rank for specific keywords, they are going to have to be in the H1 headline.
If you don’t have an H1 headline, and I still see many websites that don’t, what’s happening there is essentially you are just saying nothing to Google, so it’s going to place your website lower than other websites which do have H1 headlines with the relevant keywords in them.
Now, an important thing to note is that each page has to have it’s own unique H1 headline that doesn’t contain keywords for other pages, otherwise you risk what’s known as “keyword cannibalization”. This basically means that more than one page is targeting the same keywords. What happens then is Google doesn’t know which page is the most relevant for that keyword, and as a result both rank lower.
So for example, if you have two pages, one for family law, and one for divorce, you don’t want “family law” in the H1 title of the divorce page, otherwise you risk causing conflict between the two and it’s likely that both will have a hard time ranking.
So that’s a basic overview of the H1 headline, if you have any questions feel free to ask and I’ll be happy to answer them.