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“Value prop” H1 vs. SEO-optimized H1
If you take a look at big companies with the 'best' landing pages and brands, they almost never have an SEO-optimized H1 on their landing pages. It's always vague marketing terms that no one would actually ever search for.
Examples in project management software
* Linear = "Linear is a better way to build products"
* Trello = "Trello brings all your tasks, teammates, and tools together"
* Smartsheet = "The enterprise work management platform"
* Clickup = "One app to replace them all"
* Asana = "A smarter way to work"
How should companies think about using vague marketing fluff in their H1 vs. the targeted search term that customers would actually search for (e.g., "project management software for [x]")?
Does Google want pages to have the boring SEO-optimized H1 or is that actually a negative signal since 'legit' products rarely have it?
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1 Reply
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it sounds like you actually mean home page not landing page? if so it’s quite common to not worry much about ranking the home page since it is often trying to do a lot more than rank. product, service, use case, solution pages, are what you’d be ranking instead since they can be more focused on rankings.
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You picked the H1s from the home page of big tech companies that probably only care about showing for branded searches. If you look at their blog/service pages, you’ll probably find Keyword rich H1s.
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More authoritative websites can pull this off
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A few things you need to consider. As SEO is a system, not a checklist/binary list of things that all work the same way or in a certain order.
H tags are ranking signals, not ranking factors and their order doesn’t matter. You also have to consider that not all “landing pages” are “SEO landing pages” and that not every phrase has competition.
Any branded conversion term – like “Asana signup”, “Asana pricing” – wont have competition that Asana needs to heavily optimize for – they could do it with just the slug or the page title or any text in the page, it doesn’t have to be a H1
YOu’re thinking about low-PR sites where you get more authority to relevance by keeping the Page Title and H1 more consistent – as is or at least was with Google Ads.
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I am of the mindset that your home page should absolutely have a clear, concise value prop – CLEARly portraying what you do – with some unique, personable element. You SHOULD be able to work in at least one keyword. If you can’t – make it human first. You can put your keywords in an h2 tag, honestly it’s not earth shattering the difference between h1 and 2
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They are ranking with authority, not with onpage.
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