Adding ‘Custom’ to the H1 SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

Adding ‘Custom’ to the H1 SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the outcome in organic traffic was when we added a new keyword to the H1 of a customer’s product pages.

Here’s what people thought:

The majority of our followers believe adding additional keywords to the H1 would positively impact traffic. In contrast, almost 30% and 7% believe this change would either not have a noticeable impact or have a negative impact on organic traffic, respectively.

In this case, the majority were correct…sort of – read the full case study below!

The Case Study
The H1 is one of the oldest known ways to improve relevancy as H1s are used to highlight the page’s main topic, contributing to the overall user experience. While the H1 has been standard in SEO best practice for years, its significance as a ranking factor has often been questioned and debated.

In early 2020, Google’s John Mueller took time to explain Google uses headings to understand page content better, and that this can result in ranking improvements, or in ranking for new searches.

We decided to experiment with the H1 of a customer’s website to see if it would allow Google to improve our rankings for a broader set of keywords. We ran this experiment with an ecommerce company that offers customizable products by adding the keyword “Custom” to the front of the H1 of the product pages. Note: “custom” already appeared elsewhere on the page, in the title, and in other headings.