How to fix heading structure
You fix heading structure by giving the page 1 true main heading that names the topic, then breaking the body into sections whose headings say what each section contains. Google's SEO starter guide puts it plainly: “Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.” Skipped heading levels are not a ranking penalty. The real value is segmentation: a clear heading turns the text below it into a passage a machine can lift and a reader can scan.
The symptom: nobody can find anything in the page, including the machines
The page is one long column of text, or worse, one long column of text decorated with headings that mean nothing. "Welcome." "Our Services." "Quality You Can Trust." A visitor scanning for a price or a timeline finds no handhold and leaves. A retrieval system looking for a quotable section on a specific subtopic finds no boundary where that subtopic starts or stops, so it quotes a competitor whose page is segmented.
The other common shape of this failure is heading soup: three H1s because the theme used them for styling, an H4 floating above an H2, headings on things that are not sections at all. Readers mostly survive this. Screen reader users, who navigate by heading outline, do not. They hear the page's skeleton read aloud, and if the skeleton is nonsense, the page is nonsense.
The cause: headings got treated as font sizes
Somewhere along the way, heading tags became a way to make text bigger instead of a way to declare structure. Page builders and themes made it worse by wiring H1 into components that repeat, so a homepage ends up announcing three main topics. And copywriters were taught that headings are for slogans, so sections got labeled with mood ("Excellence, Delivered") instead of content ("What a repair visit costs").
The result is a page whose visual hierarchy and semantic hierarchy disagree. Humans read the visual one. Machines and assistive tech read the semantic one. When the two tell different stories, every reader who is not looking at your pixels gets the broken version.
The fix: one main heading, sections that say what they contain
Three moves, in order:
- One H1, and it names the topic. The main heading should say what the page is about in the words a searcher would use. Not "Welcome," not the company name. One per page keeps the outline unambiguous.
- H2s as section titles, question-shaped where natural. If a section answers "how much does it cost," the honest heading is that question or its direct answer. Do not force every heading into a question. Force every heading to describe its section.
- Each section self-contained under its heading. This is the part that pays in AI search. Retrieval systems lift heading-plus-passage chunks, so a section that makes sense without the sections around it is a section that can be quoted alone. Our guide on passage extractability covers the writing side of this in depth.
<!-- Before: headings as decoration --> <h1>Welcome</h1> <h1>Our Services</h1> <h4>Quality You Can Trust</h4> <!-- After: one main heading, sections that say what they contain --> <h1>Water heater repair in Austin</h1> <h2>How much does water heater repair cost?</h2> <h2>Repair or replace: how to decide</h2> <h2>What to do before the plumber arrives</h2>
Keep the levels in order where you can, H2 under H1, H3 under H2. Not because a ranking depends on it, but because order is free and the people using heading navigation get a coherent outline.
Be honest: skipped levels are not a penalty
You will find SEO advice claiming that jumping from H2 to H4 hurts rankings. Google's starter guide says the opposite, in writing: “Having your headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order.” The same guide adds that there is no ideal number of headings a page should have. So we will not flag your H2-to-H4 jump as a ranking emergency, because it is not one.
What we will flag is the thing the folklore distracts from. Headings earn their keep twice, and neither payment comes from a ranking bonus. First, extraction: engines that assemble answers work in passages, and headings are the clearest markers of where a passage begins and what it claims to cover. Second, accessibility: heading order is the difference between a screen reader user navigating your page in seconds and abandoning it. The starter guide calls semantic order "fantastic for screen readers" for a reason. Fix headings for those two audiences and the search benefit comes along for free, in the form of sections machines can actually use.
Verify: read the outline, not the page
Open your page, open developer tools, and pull just the headings (searching the Elements panel for h1 through h4 works, as does any browser outline extension). Read the outline alone. It should read like a table of contents a stranger could navigate: one topic at the top, sections that each name their contents. If a heading could sit above any section on any website, it is decoration, not structure.
Then run the machine's version of that test. Paste your link into the full Brimm audit and we will extract your heading outline the way a crawler does, count your H1s, and show you which sections could stand alone as quotable passages. Pair the structural fix with an opening that answers, covered in how to add answer blocks AI can cite, and see what is AEO for why segmented pages win in answer engines. The rest of the fix library covers the other failures we find most.