You actually hear little about the importance of good subheadings in a text, even though they help improve readability and make a demonstrable contribution to Google ranking.
SEO specialists always pay a lot of attention to a good title, H1 and an optimal Meta Description. You read little about the importance of good clear subheadings. That's a shame, because they help you put a text down properly in one go. The 'fast' online reader can use good subheadings to scan what the text is about and whether it is worth reading. But in addition to making your text clearer to your reader, text that has good subheadings is also very good for Google.
If you think carefully about your text beforehand and organize your text logically, it is good to write short paragraphs and provide them with a descriptive subheading for your paragraph. If you do that smartly, a scanning reader can already see what your full text is about by just reading the subheadings. For each paragraph, make sure that the content of your paragraph is actually about the headline. It must be relevant.
It is important that your subheading is never longer than 1 sentence. So make sure that your subheadings together form a kind of summary. Never use capital letters only in a subheading. After all, you want the subheading to be part of your text and not as a separate sentence. It's also useful to use a little more white space above the subheading than below. This way, you ensure that you show by form that the subheading belongs to the underlying paragraph.
By using subheadings, you ensure a good structure of your text and a good structure of a text is simply easier to process for the google bots. Just think about how you use Google yourself. Most people type in a keyword or ask Google a question. If Google then has to filter the answer from a huge amount of text, that is more difficult than if it is already delivered in a structured way. Someone who is sent by Google to a page where they first have to wrestle through a huge amount of text will click away from that page more quickly. Someone who immediately reads the correct information will be more likely to stay on that page. And that is exactly a statistic that Google uses in its ranking, among other things. Of course, Google would like someone who asks them a question to also get the right answer, because then they'll come back and people who come back more often can watch more ads. If I ask Google the question “what should a good subheading meet”, google will probably tell you the previous paragraph. Perhaps even at the top of the question and answer results.
You may not have heard of it before, but organizing your subheadings into H1 through H4 is important. Or rather, we should say H2 through H4, because you reserve the H1 title for the main subject of your text and you only use an H1 once! The H1 tells Google what the article is about in one sentence. Then divide your subheadings into H2, 3, 4. Where you always keep a fixed order. For example, the paragraph titles are all H2. If you still have subheadings in a paragraph, make them H3 and if it also contains headings, make them H4. Always use a fixed order from most important to least important.
Good luck with writing your web texts and blogs! Do you need support? Then let me know. Our copywriters and SEO and web specialists are happy to help you!
