Using H1 for a website's main title vs individual page headings

I was recently contacted by friends who had an SEO audit done on their website, and one of the items that was flagged in their SEO report was that they were using a 'Heading 1' or 'H1' tag for the name of their website, and using H2 tags for main titles of individual pages.

According to the SEO company who performed the audit, this is bad practice, and can have a negative impact on SEO. It's believed that search engines use the H1 tag to determine the subject of the page, that there should only be one H1 tag, and it should be used to state the content of the page, not the website for those reasons.

But is there any truth in that?

To cut a long article short: no, there's nothing wrong with using H1 tags for your site's main title, and using H2 tags to describe the page content. There's no problem if you want to avoid doing this, and instead use H1 for the individual page titles either.

Considerations for page titles

Whilst you're free to choose either of the two ways to title your pages, what's important is to make your HTML pages semantically correct: that means your titles and content should follow some sort of order. It's fine to have multiple headings on a page, it's even okay to have multiple H1 headings on a page, but make sure the headings follow a logical order: don't jump from a H1 tag to an H3 tag for example, just because the text in the H3 tag "looks" like a better size/fit to you, or make up your own arbitary rules about when to use certain heading sizes, such as "all info boxes on the page will use H4".

Search engines don't read the page like we do, they don't see the fancy design or layout, so they process the HTML as they see it, and you can harm your SEO ranking by breaking these rules.

What does Google have to say on use of headings?

Google has a useful video on use of heading tags which you can watch on YouTube. Click here to watch Google's advice on H1 tags on YouTube.