Using H2 for Product names on Category pages?

[Blckhood]

I'm struggling to find articles that consider this beyond about 2015, so I wondered if anyone else had an opinion;

My e-commerce site has category pages that have the category title as H1 (as I'd expect), but the product names are just spans that have a CSS style. Would I be better served by having my product titles as H2, even though it'd mean dropping 15 onto a page, and have negligible other text?

Love to hear thoughts on the matter.

 

[Community]

I personally prefer to see product listing titles on category pages as headings as an indication that its a seperation of content. Obviously that change alone may not make a huge amount of difference but i'd still do it.

Take a look at the top 10 competitors, see how they are using their canonicals for categories and pagination and how they are marking up their categories, I would imagine most will be using H2 or H3.

 

[Happy Koala]

personally i think that many h2's without text will over optimise the page.

the way to get more content on a page with keywords in is to have more products on your category page.

 

[Blckhood]

Thanks @Happy Koala - I'm not sure that's realistic though, we use Magento which will plonk 12, 24 or 36ish products on a page depending on the user's pagination settings.

Interesting, I contrasted our site with some big players (Argos, Screwfix etc) and none seem to use H1 or H2 as the basis for their category page listings. That's not to say that it wont help, but it leads me to believe that if the data is marked up correctly, Google will recognise product names, even if they're not in H2 or H1 tags.

 

[Community]

Interestingly I've seen a few bigger sites move to span and p over headings for such usage after site revamps. Would be interesting to see if there was any measurable difference.

There are plenty of examples of heading usage, for example :

( H2 ) https://www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-productaffiliation-footwear/category-shoes#1_272

( H5 ) https://www.smythstoys.com/uk/en-gb/toys/action-figures-and-playsets/avengers/c/SM06010101

Google would still recognise the product names and the linking pages they refer to whether you used headings or not, it just wouldnt be seen as a seperation of content which a heading represents.

If you were comparing say 10 products on an article, you wouldnt write them in a block of text with headings just as bold text. You would seperate them into headed paragraphs for correct structure.

Product listings in my opinion shouldnt be any different. But a worthy debate, It would be interesting if someone had tangible data to backup the effects of either usage .