Google confirms heading tags are a strong ranking signal

While we don’t usually see something about SEO being confirmed by Google but John Mueller has done the unexpected during a recent webinar. You might be aware by now that Google’s John Mueller conducts regular webinars where he talks to fellow SEOs about some things along with taking questions from people.

In a recent webinar, he had said that Google does see a lot of bad reviews and might take them into consideration regarding a listing or a company to feel that the company is not worth ranking that high up. It also means that a lot of spam reports that are part of a campaign work but they might be later reviewed as well.

Now, John Mueller has dropped another huge talking point in the world of SEO because it is basically a confirmation of thing that we knew from a long time. It was already said that heading tags are important when we talk about SEO because they are an idea for Google to understand what the article is trying to say. Mueller took a question asking him regarding whether “A page without an H1 title will still rank for keywords which is in the H2 title?”

Basically, it is said that targeted keywords need to be in the H1 tag so that Google knows that this is what the content is about. On this, John Mueller answers that the content will rank regardless of the heading tag used which is H1, H2 or something else.

Here is the most important part of this answer though which basically confirms heading tags to be one of the ranking factors:

“So headings on a page help us to better understand the content on the page.

Headings on the page are not the only ranking factor that we have.

We look at the content on its own as well.

But sometimes having a clear heading on a page gives us a little bit more information on what that section is about.”