Google says that H1 tags are useful but not critical for SEO purpose

We have kept saying that one of the most helpful things for any SEO professional is to join the Google Webmasters Hangout session which is conducted by John Mueller. Google’s John Mueller often conducts these sessions during office hours. Now, there have been a lot of great things that have come out of the various sessions he has conducted over time. And once again, we have some useful information related to the usage of heading tags on a website.

SEO professionals have a strong belief that heading tags are useful when it comes to ranking a website. There is a common thought that the heading tags are picked up more by Google’s algorithm and they get highlighted as much as the title of an article does.

They are also useful when it comes to structured data shown in search results. Now, John Mueller has also confirmed the same thing. He says that you can use any number of heading tags on a website and there is no “upper or lower bound”. However, he also mentions that you can have no heading tags or five heading tags on your website and it will rank in the same manner.

John also said that heading tags are useful for outlining the page structure so that a user would know the table of content and also jump through content in an easy and intuitive manner. Mueller added that

H1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page so that users and search engines can understand which parts of a page are kind of under different headings.

So I would use them in the proper way on a page. And especially with HTML5 having multiple H1 elements on a page is completely normal and kind of expected.

Some SEO tools flag this as an issue and say like Oh you don’t have any H1 tag or you have two H1 tags… from our point of view that’s not a critical issue.