Heading structure analyzer

Why heading structure matters for SEO and accessibility

Headings are the skeleton of a page. The H1 through H6 tags tell Google — and screen-reader users — how your content is organized: what the page is about, which sections sit under which topic, and where one idea ends and the next begins. A clear hierarchy lets a crawler understand a long article without parsing every sentence.

That structure feeds directly into how Google extracts featured snippets and the 'jump to' links it sometimes shows beneath a result. It's also an accessibility requirement: assistive technology lets users navigate by heading, so a broken outline is a broken experience for them — and accessibility and SEO increasingly pull in the same direction.

What a healthy heading outline looks like

A good outline reads like a table of contents. You should be able to glance at the heading list alone and understand the whole page.

• Exactly one H1, stating the page's main topic, near the top.
• H2s for each major section, nested logically beneath the H1.
• H3s (and deeper) only to break down the H2 above them.
• No skipped levels — never jump straight from H2 to H4.
• Every heading has real text; none are empty or used purely for visual styling.

How to fix common heading problems

Paste your page's HTML above and the analyzer rebuilds the outline, flagging missing or duplicate H1s, skipped levels, and empty headings. Two issues account for most of what it catches.

The first is headings chosen for size, not meaning — a designer picks H4 because it 'looks right.' Fix it by setting the level for hierarchy and styling it with CSS. The second is multiple H1s, common when a template's site title and the article title are both H1; demote one so a single H1 owns the page topic.