The fix, in one snippet
<h1>Running shoes for flat feet</h1>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
We collect every heading element on the page in document order and report pages with no <h1>. Headings inside <template> and removed script blocks are excluded, so what is counted is what a reader sees.
Why it matters
An H1 is not a large ranking factor on its own, and a page can rank without one. It matters for two other reasons.
The first is structure. Screen readers navigate by heading, and a document with no H1 gives no entry point: the user lands in the middle of a page with no statement of what it is. Around a quarter of screen-reader users navigate primarily by headings, so this is a real barrier rather than a theoretical one.
The second is that a missing H1 is a symptom. Pages without one are usually built from components where no component owns the subject, and that tends to show in the content too: no summary, no framing, nothing for an engine to match against a query.
How to fix it
Give every page exactly one H1 that states its subject, and make it the visible headline rather than a hidden element:
<h1>Running shoes for flat feet</h1>Logos in the header should not be H1s; the page name should. On templates where the headline comes from a CMS field, make the field required. The H1 and the title do not have to be identical, and usually should not be: the title is written for a results page, the H1 for someone already reading.
Where this fits
H1 missing is check 4 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Duplicate titles across pages (medium), where two pages with the same title compete for the same queries and give searchers no way to tell them apart. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
H1 missing closes one route in. Immediately below it: Meta description missing, where the meta description is the snippet under the headline; Thin content, where pages with very little body text rarely satisfy the query that brought someone to them, and rarely rank for anything competitive; Title length outside the useful range, where titles are truncated in search results at roughly 600 pixels.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: H1 missing (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-h1-missingThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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