If I am creating individual town pages for "replacement windows in anywhere USA" for example, should my actual page title be unique since there will obviously be other page titles with " replacement windows in anywhere USA ". Or is it the actual page content that needs to be unique?
should the H1 be unique or just the actual content be unique?
thank you
This depends on what you're comparing them to.
If you're comparing your site's pages to
each other, then the only thing
in the H1 that needs to be distinct from the other (topically identical, but location differentiated) pages is the city name, or whatever your geographic modifier is.
That said, my understanding is that the
body content should
not be identical
from page-to-page, with the only differences being the geographic references. This is debated, but IMO not worth the risk of the so-called "duplicate content penalty" (i.e., Google indexing one, but ignoring the rest of the pages, since they're virtually identical), since we aren't certain of how Google treats these. (If someone has recent evidence to the contrary, please drop a link to educate us.)
Now, if you're asking whether you're safe to use "replacement windows in anywhere USA" as your H1 (changing "anywhere" to match your geo-location name on each page) when
other window vendors in the same area use that same H1 on their site, I strongly doubt this would hurt you in any way as far as Google is concerned—provided that your site is set up to add your business name to the Title tag (e.g., "Window World | Replacement Windows in New York City" or "Replacement Windows in New York City | Window World").
Your brand name should be prefixed or suffixed to the "topical title" of the particular page. At a minimum, this is good UX, which Google is supposed to prioritize.
