> 25% of all small business websites are missing an H1 tag.
This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page).
In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this.
> SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without
Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags.
I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
> Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Nobody is saying you have to have H1 tags to rank well, but it's not going to hurt and is likely to help. It's better to tell Google what the main heading of the site is instead of Google having to guess and getting it wrong.
> I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.
Google says description meta tags don't impact your search rank but as these descriptions can optionally be shown to users, well written ones should increase click through rates. Google recommend you write meta descriptions in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en as well.
I have a list of SEO recommendations like the above that are mostly sourced from Google here:
It's true that there's a correlation / causation problem here, but consider the problem from Google's POV: they rank a certain set of results by hand, then feed those into various learning algorithms to find good predictors for quality.
If an analysis such as this finds such correlations, it's likely that Google's algorithms have also picked up on them. In other words: maybe people diligent about meta tags and H1s also write better content and should therefore rank higher (correlation). But "good writing" is hard to judge algorithmically, and Google may therefore well be turning some correlations into causations.
Really Google do very much care about how content is marked up having a relevant H1 is just the start, use of tables for tabular information, structured markup Hreflang for geo targeting and so on.
The brutal truth is many business websites are terrible
This SEO advice seems dated. Pretty sure Google doesn't care about which tags you use anymore, just that there's a visual heading (some big text at the top of the page).
In your research, did you find that sites without an H1 tag performed worse, SEO-wise? The article doesn't seem to mention this.
> SMB websites with a meta description rank 17% higher than websites without
Hard to tell if this is causal or just correlational. Maybe sites that have meta tags just tend to be better, SEO-wise, unrelated to the fact that they have meta tags.
I don't think you should give this advice unless you add meta tags to your site and then see an increase in your organic search traffic.