How To Properly Utilize Headings In Your Blog Content

When producing a new blog for your website, there are so many considerations that will determine not only the overall quality of the post – but whether or not it will succeed. You can’t worry about the content alone and then hit the publish button. What keywords will you target? Will you include imagery and infographics? And how do you plan to structure the content?

In this article, the primary focus is going to be structuring your blog content – specifically, how to properly utilize headings.

What do we mean by ‘headings’ in blog content?

Heading are numbered HTML elements that help Google (and more importantly your readers) understand what each section of an article is about and navigate it accordingly. There are 6 in total:

These numbers are in order of priority with H1 being…well, number 1 – and H6 being the least important.

The easiest way to visualize the use of all 6 headings in a blog post is with the following example from Mozilla:

<h1>Beetles</h1>

<h2>External morphology</h2>

<h3>Head</h3>

<h4>Mouthparts</h4>

<h3>Thorax</h3>

<h4>Prothorax</h4>

<h4>Pterothorax</h4>

As you can see, the main subject is Beetles, then their external morphology, and then it is broken down even further into the various body parts. This could go deeper and deeper, utilizing all 6 HTML elements.

Why use headings in your blog content?

Now that you know what the HTML headings are, why bother? Why are they so important?

Improved UX

It all comes down to the user-experience of your blog post. Imagine you click on a blog post about digital marketing services and the various types of digital marketing, and you end up on a page staring at a 3,000-word block of text; how excited would you be to dig through it?

With the proper use of those HTML elements however, you could otherwise skip to the specific digital marketing services you were most interested in learning about, and their respective pros and cons, rather than trying to trawl through it all.

In doing so, it makes the content easier to scan and it enables the reader to skip past any irrelevant information and get straight down to the nitty gritty.

And even if the reader is excited to read the entire article, when the content is broken down accordingly with a logical structure to follow it makes the experience all the more pleasurable.

Because Google loves it!

And of course, another reason to use headings in your blog content is because Google expects it. Using the above example of a website with a giant wall of text and no HTML elements to break it up: that website will have a very difficult time ranking if that is as far as their commitment to quality UX design goes.

Google wants to reward websites that are actively making an effort to improve the on-page experience for their users and HTML elements are just one very small factor in that regard (not to mention page load speed, keyword search intent, and the quality of the written content itself, etc.).

Conclusion: Keep your house in order

The way that you structure your content is critical for the overall on page experience. If you want your website visitors to have a positive experience and come back time and time again, you’ve got to use the tools available to you – so make the most of those headings and keep your house in order!

Of course, unless you are a landing page design expert, it’s not always easy to create a world-class on-page experience for your users. In which case, it may be worth hiring a digital marketing agency to help you when publishing new content on your blog.