Testing H1 Capitalisation: Uppercase vs Proper Case in Google Rankings

At Brave Bison, we never stop testing. So, we decided to take a closer look at something that’s often overlooked in SEO – the format of your H1 tags. Does it matter if your H1 is in uppercase or proper case? We set out to find out.

The Hypothesis

Our hypothesis: Google treats uppercase and proper case H1s equally when ranking pages as the semantic meaning doesn’t change due to its formatting.

The Test 
 
We ran a test across 70 location pages for a travel client, changing variant pages from an uppercase H1 to a proper case H1. The goal was simple: measure any rank difference between the two formats. After gathering location rank data over time, we were ready to see what the numbers had to say.

Control - Uppercase: {PRODUCT TO PURCHASE} IN {LOCATION}

Variant – Proper case: {Product to Purchase} in {Location}

The Results 
The outcome showed a slight edge for proper case H1s. We saw a rank difference of +0.9 in favour of proper case (10.6 vs. 11.5 for uppercase). It wasn’t a massive difference, but the numbers don’t lie. Proper case slightly outperformed uppercase.

What does this mean?

While this result didn’t blow us away, it does give us something to think about. Google may be demoting the uppercase H1s which are more likely to be templated or generated and instead rewarding the Proper Case H1s which appear to be manually written.

Testing as Standard

Securing implementation of SEO tickets can be a challenge – sometimes a site change can be a big ask in the context of limited development resource and lack of clarity on business impact.

Running low scope, low risk tests allows us to demonstrate measurable impact early. These results help build credibility and provide the evidence needed to secure buy in for larger, more resource intensive changes.

Next steps 
 
We’re not done yet. We’ll be testing this across more locations and different types of pages to see if the trend holds true.