The fix, in one snippet
<h1>Running shoes for flat feet</h1>
<h2>How we tested</h2>
<h3>Best overall</h3>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 count <h1> elements per page and list any page with more than one, together with the headings found, so you can see whether they are genuinely separate sections or a styling accident.
Why it matters
Google has said repeatedly that multiple H1s do not cause a ranking penalty, and that is true. The problem is not the penalty; it is the ambiguity. A page with four H1s is asserting four equally important subjects, and both a reader skimming and an engine summarising have to guess which is the page's actual topic.
In practice multiple H1s are rarely deliberate. They come from components that each use H1 for their own title: a hero, a sidebar promotion, a related-articles block. The visual hierarchy looks right because each is styled differently, while the document outline says they are peers.
How to fix it
Use one H1 for the page subject and demote the rest to the level that reflects their place in the outline:
<h1>Running shoes for flat feet</h1>
<h2>How we tested</h2>
<h2>The shortlist</h2>
<h3>Best overall</h3>Style by class, not by tag, so a component can look like a headline without claiming to be one. Where a component genuinely does not know its level, pass it in as a parameter rather than defaulting to H1.
One exception is worth knowing: in HTML5 each <section> and <article> was originally meant to start a new outline, which would have made several H1s correct. That outline algorithm was never implemented by any browser or screen reader and has since been removed from the specification, so the flat document outline is the only one that exists in practice.
Where this fits
More than one H1 is check 11 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 Meta description length (low), where descriptions much shorter than 70 characters waste the space; much longer than 160 are cut off mid-sentence. 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
More than one H1 closes one route in. Immediately below it: Reading difficulty, where how hard the page is to read, measured rather than guessed: Sentence length, word length and the Flesch score they produce; Title does not match the page's own words, where if none of a page's most frequent words appear in its title, the title and the content are describing different things.
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: More than one H1 (low severity)
Scanner check id: seo-h1-multipleThe 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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