This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung
SEO
How do I correctly arrange headings from H1 to H6?
You arrange headings correctly by having the page start with an H1, with every further level directly following the previous one: H2 follows H1, H3 follows H2. The rank levels H1 through H6 together form the page's table of contents. Skipped levels — H2 directly followed by H4, say — tear gaps into this structure.
Headings are the page's table of contents
Picture a book: the book title corresponds to H1, the chapter headings correspond to H2, the subchapters to H3. These rank levels create a table of contents that shows the structure at a glance. Search engines read your page's headings the same way: they use it to recognise what topics the page covers and how they relate. Anyone who chooses a heading in the content management system purely by looks — "H4 looks best in our design" — builds a table of contents with missing chapters. Appearance can be styled independently of the rank; the order of levels is a matter of logic, not design.
Blind users navigate via the heading list
People using a screen reader rarely read a page top to bottom. Instead, they have the headings read out as a list and jump straight to the section they want — the way sighted people skim a page. The rank levels tell them what's the main topic and what's a subpoint. If the page jumps from H2 straight to H4, it creates the impression a section is missing, or the relationships get muddled. A clean heading sequence therefore serves two goals at once: search engines understand the structure, and people with visual impairments find their way around. We check both from the same source code.
How we check the heading sequence
The SEO audit area reads all of a page's headings in their order and checks two things. First: does the structure start with an H1? If the page starts with an H2 or H3 instead, the report flags that as a note. Second: does every level follow the previous one? Every jump across a level — from H2 straight to H4, say — gets counted and stated in the report with its number. A page with no headings at all counts as its own shortcoming, since then there's no recognisable structure at all.
- Have your agency show you the heading structure of your most important pages as a list.
- Start every page with an H1, and have H2 sections follow below it.
- Choose the rank level by the content's logic, never by the font size in the design.
- Ask your agency to control heading appearance via style templates, so the rank levels stay free.
- Check after every major page redesign whether the structure still has no gaps.
