H1 tags and keywords for subpages, is it best practice to reuse the keywords?

[Deacyde]

So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes.

Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this:

Shoes > Dress Shoes  > Dress Shoe Cleaning

Dress Shoe Repair

Work Shoes  >  Work Shoe Cleaning

Work Shoe Repair

Play Shoes   >   Play Shoe Cleaning

Play Shoe Repair

Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords.

Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning.

Any advice?

[ChrisAshton]

No problem, happy to help.

If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes.

Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes.

This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs".

The nav would look more like:

Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs

With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.

[Deacyde]

Thanks for this, it's been rather helpful, although the example I gave for shoes was just an example. The site currently I'm working on is all about products, and as a benefit to our users we've created further info pages for each product about cleaning and repair. As much as I do see your reasoning for structure to be Services > items   It's strongly a focus to have the products be at the forefront of this and the info about the products such as cleaning / repair inside as a subpage, since they wouldn't mind ranking for each product as well ranking for the cleaning  and the repair of each of those products as well.

So with this extra bit of info, would you recommend the structure from your comment still?

The way we're doing things on the redesign is, still sticking to the shoe example, if we sold shoes, boots and sandals, and someone went to dress shoe cleaning, we'd structure like: site.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning

A more generic way for this same issue ( without the shoe example ) for cleaning information section for a particular product:

site.com/parent-category(Big keyword)/(secondary big keyword)subcategory-item/(longtail for info related pages)subcategory items cleaning

[ChrisAshton]

Search engines do quite a good job of understanding what your site/pages/content is about these days so forcing the exact-match everywhere isn't really necessary. Rather than focussing on the H1s for the minute, I think a revision of your nav/site structure may be a better solution; apologies for going almost immediately off topic but it does still answer your question.

A great nav is going to be as "flat" as practical and designed to take the user from page-load to conversion in as fewer steps as possible.

Likewise, if these are core services that you offer, the closer those pages are to the top of your nav the better, no need to bury them several layers deep and miss out on some of that internal strength.

You'll know your target audience better than me but I'd be more inclined to structure it like this:

Shoe Cleaning
     Dress Shoes
     Work Shoes
     Play Shoes

Shoe Repair
    Dress Shoes
    Work Shoes
    Play Shoes

In most cases you'd even be better off dropping the "shoes" from these sub-items but a menu item of "dress" or "work" is a little confusing in this context.

The reason I'd suggest doing it this way is to satisfy user intent. I'd expect that most of your users have come to your site looking for one particular thing - either shoe repairs or shoe cleaning. It's entirely likely that if they're getting their shoes repaired, they may also be interested in getting them cleaned at the same time, but they arrive on your site with the intent of gathering information on your repairs so getting these should be as clear as possible.