What your headings tell a search engine

Structure, not size

A heading level says how a piece of content relates to what surrounds it. It does not say how large the text should be, and the two have been separable for a very long time.

The common fault is promoting a line to a bigger heading because it should look more important, or demoting one because it looked too loud on a phone.

Decide the level from the meaning, then style it however the design requires. A minor heading can be set large and the outline underneath stays honest.

A heading level says how a piece of content relates to what surrounds it. Size is a styling decision and the two have been separable for a very long time.

One main heading

Give each page one top level heading naming what the page is about. Two leaves both a reader and an engine unsure which subject the page actually covers.

It should agree with the title in meaning without being identical. The title is written for a search result; the heading is written for somebody who has arrived.

This is also the most common structural fault on small sites, usually because a logo or a tagline was marked up as a heading in the site template.

The commonest cause of a second one is a logo or tagline marked up as a heading in the site template, which is invisible until somebody lists the outline.

Order and depth

Section headings run beneath the main one, and subsections beneath those. Skipping a level implies a layer that is not there, which reads as a gap in the outline.

Depth should follow content. A long guide genuinely needs subsections; a short service page does not and should not invent them.

Twenty headings all at the same level is a flat list rather than a structure, and it suggests the page is covering twenty things rather than one thing thoroughly.

Writing headings a search engine can use

A heading should survive being read alone, because that is how it is encountered in a heading list and in a skim.

Say what the section contains rather than labelling it. What a roof inspection covers beats the single word overview, and it matches the way somebody would search.

Questions work well as headings when the section answers them, because that is often the exact phrasing somebody typed.

• Say what the section contains, not what it is called
• Write it to survive being read alone
• Use a question where the section answers one
• Include the subject naturally, once
• Keep them roughly parallel in shape
• Avoid single-word labels like overview or introduction

Keywords in headings

Including the subject naturally helps, because it confirms what the section is about. Repeating a phrase across every heading does not, and it reads badly.

The engine is working out the subject from the whole page. Headings contribute to that picture, and they are not a scoring field to be filled.

If a heading only makes sense as a keyword rather than as a description, it is the wrong heading.

Headings and answer engines

Systems that extract answers rely heavily on structure, because a heading followed by a direct answer is the easiest thing to quote safely.

A page organized as clear questions with clear answers is far more quotable than the same content written as continuous prose.

That is the same structure that helps somebody skimming on a phone, which is a reasonable sign it is the right structure regardless.

A heading followed by a direct answer is the easiest thing to quote safely, which is the overlap described in where accessibility and SEO agree.

How ours are set

Every page written by Website Builder Studio carries one main heading with section headings in order, generated from the page plan rather than from styling decisions.

Section headings are checked against sibling pages so that a family of related pages does not end up sharing an outline, which is how a set of pages starts reading as one template.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, and a skipped level or a second main heading stops it publishing.

Section headings are checked against sibling pages, so a family of related pages cannot end up sharing an outline.