When I surveyed the websites of 88 independent businesses near me, I expected the headline problem to be dated designs. It was not. Of the 40 websites that failed the basic on-page search check, 39 had a problem with the main heading — the most common single defect in the whole survey, and by a margin.
It is an easy one to end up with, because headings are the one piece of page structure that looks like decoration. They are the big bold text at the top of a section. If the big bold text is the right size and in the right place, the page looks finished, and there is nothing on screen to suggest otherwise.
Underneath, headings are doing a different job entirely.
What headings are actually for
Every heading on a page is written in the underlying code as a numbered level: h1 down to h6. Those numbers are not sizes. They are an outline, the same shape as the contents page of a report — h1 is the title of the document, h2 is a chapter, h3 is a subsection inside that chapter.
Three things read that outline rather than looking at the page:
- Search engines. The outline is one of the clearer signals of what a page is about and how its parts relate. A page with a single sensible h1 and orderly h2s underneath is straightforward to interpret.
- AI assistants. When something like ChatGPT or Google's AI results pull an answer out of a page, they are working from the same structure. A well-outlined page hands over a clean, quotable section. A flat one hands over a wall of text and takes its chances.
- Screen readers. Someone using one commonly navigates a page by jumping from heading to heading, in the same way a sighted visitor scans down the page. If the headings are absent or out of order, that shortcut stops working and the only way through is start to finish.
Headings are the summary of your page that gets read by everything that is not a person with the page in front of them. If the outline does not make sense on its own, you are relying on visitors alone to work out what the page is about.
The four ways it usually drifts
None of these is unusual, and I have found all four on websites that are otherwise in good order.
No h1 at all. The page has a large heading at the top, but it was styled as ordinary text made bigger, or as an h2, or it lives inside an image. The page has a title visually and no title structurally.
Several h1s on one page. Common where a page is assembled from blocks or sections, each of which was built to be self-contained. Every block brought its own top-level heading with it. The outline now claims the page is about five different things.
Levels skipped. An h2 followed by an h4, because the h4 happened to be the size that looked right. The outline now has a gap in it, and anything reading the structure has to guess whether that h4 belongs to the h2 above it or to something missing.
Headings used for emphasis. A short line in the middle of a paragraph — a price, a phone number, a closing line — marked up as a heading because it needed to stand out. Structurally it now claims to be a new section.
How to check yours in about five minutes
You do not need a tool to do the first pass. Open a page and write down, in order, every piece of text that looks like a heading. Then read that list back on its own. If it reads like a sensible table of contents for the page, the structure is probably close. If it reads like a jumble, or if the page title is missing from it, that is the thing to look at.
To see the actual levels rather than guess at them, there are two straightforward options. Most browsers will show you the code behind any element if you right-click it and choose Inspect — the tag will read h1, h2 and so on. Or install one of the free accessibility extensions for Chrome or Firefox, most of which will list the heading outline of a page for you in one click.
This is a check you can do yourself on your five most important pages in an afternoon, without touching anything. Knowing which pages are affected is most of the work; the fixes are usually small.
What good looks like
The rules are short enough to hold in your head.
- One h1 per page, and it should say what the page is about. On a service page that is usually close to the name of the service.
- Descend in order. h2 for each main section, h3 for anything nested inside one. Do not skip a level going down. Coming back up is fine — an h3 followed by the next h2 is normal.
- Say something. "Our Services" is a heading; "Boiler servicing and repairs in Stoke-on-Trent" is a heading that also earns its place in the outline.
- Style separately from structure. If an h2 is too big for the page, change the size in the stylesheet rather than demoting it to an h4. The two decisions look the same on screen and are not the same decision.
What it is worth
I want to be measured about this, because heading structure is not a growth lever and anyone who tells you it is has something to sell. Fixing it will not put you at the top of a competitive search result on its own.
What it does is remove a small, avoidable source of ambiguity from every page you have. It makes the page easier for a search engine to categorise, easier for an AI assistant to quote accurately rather than paraphrase loosely, and genuinely easier to use for a group of visitors who currently have to work harder than everyone else. On most websites it is an hour of work across the whole thing, it never needs doing again, and it is the sort of groundwork that makes everything else you do more likely to land.
It was the most common fault I found precisely because it is invisible. Nothing about a page with a broken outline looks broken, so there is no moment where anyone notices and fixes it.
If you want the wider picture the survey produced, it is in the full write-up, with the anonymised dataset. For how the same structure affects what AI assistants can pick up, I have written that up separately in what AI search engines see on your website. And if you would rather have someone go through the whole website and hand you the list, that is what the monthly SEO Management crawl produces.