H1 tags under 10 characters - such as “Blog”, “Home”, or “FAQ” - are too vague to be useful for SEO. These ultra-short headings provide almost no information about the page’s content, forcing search engines to rely on other signals to understand the topic. They also fail to include target keywords, missing an important ranking opportunity.

This guide shows you how to find every page with a short H1 tag using the crawler.sh CLI.

Step 1: Install crawler.sh CLI

Install the CLI with a single command:

curl -fsSL https://install.crawler.sh | sh

This downloads the correct binary for your operating system and architecture, places it in ~/.crawler/bin/, and adds it to your PATH. Restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc) to pick up the new PATH entry.

Verify the installation:

crawler --version

Step 2: Crawl the target website

Run a full crawl of the website you want to audit:

crawler crawl https://example.com

The crawler extracts H1 tag content from every page. Results are saved as an NDJSON file (.crawl) in the current directory. For larger sites:

crawler crawl https://example.com --max-pages 5000

Step 3: Run SEO audit

Run the SEO analysis on your crawl data:

crawler seo example-com.crawl

The short H1 check flags every page where the H1 text is under 10 characters.

Step 4: Identify short H1 tags

Look for the Short H1 section in the SEO report. Common examples:

Single-word headings like “Blog”, “News”, “Shop”, “Home”
Navigation-style labels used as headings (“FAQ”, “About”, “Contact”)
Abbreviated or truncated headings from template constraints
Placeholder headings that were never updated

Step 5: Fix and re-crawl

Expand each short H1 to be descriptive while staying under 70 characters:

“Blog” → “Latest SEO Tips & Website Crawling Guides”
“FAQ” → “Frequently Asked Questions About crawler.sh”
“Shop” → “Browse Our Complete Product Collection”
“Home” → a descriptive heading about your main value proposition

After fixing, re-crawl to verify:

crawler crawl https://example.com
crawler seo example-com.crawl

Why short H1 tags matter for SEO

The H1 is one of the strongest on-page ranking signals. An H1 like “Blog” tells search engines nothing useful - it matches millions of other pages and contains no relevant keywords. Expanding short H1 tags to include descriptive, keyword-rich text helps search engines understand and rank your pages for the right queries. It is a small change with outsized impact on organic visibility.