Do my title and H1 need to agree on the topic?
They should be about the same thing, but they should not say it in the same words. When the page title, the main heading and the description point at one topic, a machine has its answer confirmed. When the heading talks about something else entirely, it has to pick one, and it may pick wrong.
What it actually is
A page names its subject in several places, each written for a different reader: the title for tabs and listings, the H1 for the person who has arrived, the description for whoever is deciding whether to come. We compare those three. We do not read your web address or your body text for this, and we are not counting keywords — the question is only whether the heading shares a subject with the title or the description.
Why it matters
An assistant summarising a page leans on exactly these declarations to decide what the page is. When they agree, that decision is easy. When the title says "Commercial roofing in Leeds" and the heading says "Built on trust since 1987", the heading carries no subject at all, and a machine has only the title left to go on — or it reaches for whatever text comes next.
What good looks like
Three statements of one subject, phrased for three audiences. The title is the precise name, the heading says it to the visitor in a more human way, and the description expands on it. They share the subject, often a word or two, without being copies of each other.
Being honest about it
No standard requires this, and we want to be upfront about that: the HTML specification treats the title and the headings as separate things, and nobody publishes a rule that they must share words. We check it because disagreement is a real source of machine confusion, and we check it gently. It can only ever be worth a look, never a failure, and a slogan heading on a homepage passes as long as the description carries the subject.
Where most sites go wrong
The common pattern is a heading used as a slogan — a brand line or a mood rather than a statement of what the page is — on a page whose title and description say something different. The other is a template mismatch: every page in a section shares one heading while the titles change, so most of those pages declare a subject they do not have.
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