Anyone who works as a strategic copywriter needs to know how to use heading tags in SEO. After all, they are essential not only to visually organize the content, but to inform the material’s priority to Google. This is necessary because, despite having 100 billion monthly searches, Google cannot (yet) understand the content of the text on its own.
Therefore, it needs help to understand the purpose of each article. Amongst the elements used for that are the SEO headings (the famous H1, H2, H3 and so on). If you want to improve the ranking of your content, you need to understand how to use them.
How to use H1, H2, H3 heading tags on your site
Suppose you are the proud owner of a plastic surgery clinic and you want to teach your reader (someone who has had or is thinking about having surgery) how to recover better from a rhinoplasty. For this reason, you create an article entitled: “How to recover better from a rhinoplasty”. Within this article, you create several intertitles, such as:
- Take care of food;
- Exercise: what to avoid;
- Meditate and take care of mental health.
Within these intertitles, you create several subtitles. For example, within the second intertitle, “Take care of food”, you mention:
- Fruit smoothies and soups;
- Chocolate and caffeine: how much can you consume;
- Forbidden foods.
Now that you’ve produced the whole skeleton of your article, it should look something like this:
How to recover better from a rhinoplasty
1.Take care of food;
- Fruit smoothies and soups;
- Chocolate and caffeine: how much can you consume;
- Forbidden foods
2. Exercise: what to avoid
3. Meditate and take care of mental health.
In other words, what you wrote about “fruit smoothies and soups” is within the title “How to recover better from a rhinoplasty”. When someone searches for “fruit smoothies and soups to have after surgery”, the article will have some relevance to show. However, how to communicate this list of priorities to Google? Using the tags H1, H2, H3 and so on.
The tags define the hierarchy of content blocks in your article. H1 is always the highest priority and is used for the title of your content, always. H2 is the second priority and is used for intertitles. H3, as you already guessed, is priority number 3 and used for subtitles within intertitles. It is still possible to use H4, H5, but they are much rarer.
How to use the keyword in Headings?
In addition to helping to organize the content of your article, headings play an important role in strengthening the keyword of the content. In the case of H1, the keyword should ideally be at the beginning of the content. Perhaps not necessarily in the header tag, but in the meta tag. The Header Tag is the “headline” of your content. It is the text that will appear as a title when the reader is reading the article. The Meta Tag is the “SEO Title”, the title of the article that should appear on Google.
In both cases, the keyword of the article must be used. However, in SEO Title it is better to put it at the beginning. In the case of H2, it is also important to use the keyword, but without exaggeration. If an article has 3 intertitles, then one of them must have the keyword. If you have 4, use two (or use the literal keyword in one and a semantic variation in the other). In the case of H3, it is not so relevant to use the keyword. Therefore, you can avoid or use semantic variations to make the content richer.
How many times to use each heading tag in the content?
Since H1 is used to categorize content as a whole, it should only be used once. The other tags can be used as many times as you like, but respecting the order of your hierarchy. For example, the text cannot open with an H3, leave for an H2, have an H5 inside the H2 and then go to an H3 again.
This leaves the content completely confused and Google does not rank well because it cannot understand the article.
So always remember the priority:
* H1 is the content itself;
* H2 are the main divisions;
* H3 are the divisions within each group.
Now that you have read this article, you already know how to use Heading tags in SEO. So you can do an audit on your website to check if all your articles are in good formats. Before you go, however, don’t forget to leave a comment with your opinion on the subject!