Some “SEO instructions” on the internet take using the same content for meta title (title tag) and H1 (header tag) as a problem, and in their opinion, it would be a best practice to use different texts for meta title and H1 tag.
It does make sense to have different texts for meta title and H1 tag on certain pages like the homepage and category pages, because meta titles are usually long in order to include primary and secondary keywords which are mostly unbranded, while H1 is usually just a very short summary of the page, even just a brand name or product name, to be direct and clear enough for visitors to understand.
However, for some other pages especially article pages, things are totally different. And you shouldn’t use different meta title and H1 tag for such article pages due to at least two reasons.
First, it could be confusing for both users and search engines – that’s certainly bad for your SEO optimization.
For example, some SEOs might create following two titles for one article, and use them as meta title and H1 tag respectively:
Meta title: How to Promote Your Products in Mainland China?
H1: 6 Ways to Market Your Products for Chinese Market
So, when someone sees your meta title in their search results, he clicks on it and enters this article page;
And after he opens this article page, he of course wouldn’t see the meta title on the top of the page; instead, what he sees first would be your H1 tag.
It’s true that both meta title and H1 tag for this post are very similar, but people would still probably get confused for a second because they are seeing two different titles, and they might doubt if they have opened the right page.
Since search engines always try to consider everything from the users’ perspective, your visitor’s confusion or the poor experience on your website would probably be reflected on your rankings on search engines.
Or let’s assume both your visitors and search engines could totally understand that your meta title and H1 tag are actually titles for the same article, then what’s the point of doing so? Why bother creating two different titles which are deemed the same by visitors and search engines?
To include more keywords? To include both “how to” and “ways to” for this instance? Then why not embed one of them into your meta description and body text, which are much more reasonable and much less over-optimized.
Second, speaking of “over-optimization”, which should be avoided in any SEO practices, it’s an obvious over-optimization to use different content for meta titles and H1 tags.
The reason is such action is purely for the benefit of SEO, instead of improving user experience and optimizing content simultaneously as for healthy and sustainable SEO tactics.
Therefore, we don’t recommend using different meta titles and H1 tags for article pages. But just note that here the “difference” refers to creating two different titles for one article deliberately, not having a meta title which is “H1 tag + category name + website name”, which is totally acceptable.