Headings and subheadings — are they really that important to SEO?
While you might already know that readers love being able to scan your pages for the most important information, you might not understand how it can play into the SEO side of things.
If you’re ready to understand blog headers and subheaders, continue reading this article, and we will show you how you can make them work for you.
Elevate User Experience
Search engines like Google care about user experience. When Google sees that people are enjoying their experience on your website, this is a good signal and may help you with your SEO efforts.
Structure Your Content for Easy Understanding
When you use headers, you structure your content in a way that people can read through like they’re riding on a raft down a smooth river. Without headings, subheadings, and proper structure, it’s more like being on a raft with rapids and rocks.
Improve Accessibility
For people that can’t read easily from the screen, having headings and subheadings allows them to access the information easily due to the HTML. The HTML makes it easy for a screen reader to understand the structure of the article so it can read it aloud to the person that needs help.
Screen readers help by offering shortcuts from one header to the next header, which makes headers even more important for the visually impaired.
Headings Carry More Weight Than Normal Text
When it comes to SEO and optimizing your on-page content, headings carry more weight than normal text. Since headings carry more weight than normal text, it is important to add your primary keyword into at least one of the headers in your content.
You’ll make it easier for people and search engines to know what your page is about. Search engines can decide whether they should rank your page, and people can decide whether it is relevant and whether they want to read it or not.
Using H1 & H2 Header Tags
If you look at a website that isn’t optimized properly, one of the most common offenses you’re likely to notice is the lack of h1 and h2 header tags. Many people don’t even know the importance of using these tags, which is why they go unused.
When you look at a website, the header 1 text is usually the text that is the largest on the page. Most of the time, this is the content’s title, and it tells the reader what to expect within the content’s page.
While you can make bigger text without using h1 or h2 header tags, it isn’t going to work the same way.
The h2 header text helps guide the reader to the part of the content they are interested in. People will scan your page and look for the specific answer they are searching for, and the h2 header text should be the one helping them with this task.
Is On-Page SEO Really That Important?
We all love backlinks, right? I mean — hello! Of course, we do.
We know that backlinks are an important part of SEO and gaining rankings in the search engines, but are on-page SEO elements like headers and subheaders moving the needle?
It’s easy to get caught up with building backlinks, but we have to give our backlinks something worth linking to, or our SEO efforts are in vain. No matter how many links you build to your site if your content isn’t serving the searcher, it’s not going to rank well.
Part of serving the searcher is taking care of on-page elements. Here are some things you should take into account when you’re working on each page of your website.
1. Site Speed
If your site is too slow, people likely won’t get to see your headers because they are going to click away. People are very impatient and want to get their information right away, so they won’t wait on your website to load more than a few seconds.
2. Navigation
Your website navigation should be easy to go through to make it easy for people to go from one interesting page to the next. You may have noticed that many people sites have “relevant” or “related” posts on the site’s sidebar, within the content and throughout the rest of the site.
The longer people stay on your site and interact with it in a positive way, the more positive signals report back to Google.
3. Content Structure
We’ve talked about structuring your content with headers and subheaders, but that isn’t the only thing you can use to structure your content. Use images to make your content flow nicely and to support those text elements of your website.
People love images, and it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words. Don’t forget about adding your primary keyword in the alt text in at least one of your photos on the page. If the image doesn’t load for people, you want them to know what it is, and you also want to send signals to the search engine that they should consider your page for that keyword.
You’re a Headings and Subheadings Master
Congrats! You’re now a headings and subheadings master, and you know how to use them to your advantage. The main reason headings and subheadings affect SEO is that they provide better user experience and signals to Google that your content is relevant.
Are you ready to take your website to the next level and get more organic traffic from Google and other top search engines? We’ve helped many other businesses, and we can help you too. Sign up for an account today and start getting real links from real authority sites.
