How to Fix: Proper heading hierarchy

Proper heading hierarchy is an important SEO check in the On-Page SEO Essentials category. This is a medium-priority issue. While not urgent, fixing it will improve your overall SEO health.

What this check is really asking

This check verifies that your headings form a clean, logical outline — one H1 per page, H2s for the main sections, H3s nested under them, no skipped levels, no headings chosen because they looked big. Headings are not styling. They are the structural skeleton of the document, and both screen readers and search engines read that skeleton to understand what the page is about and how its ideas relate.

When this check fails, the usual culprits are multiple H1s on one page, levels skipped (an H2 jumping straight to an H4), or text marked up as a heading purely to make it large. Each of those blurs the outline the machines depend on.

Why the outline matters to Google and to readers

• Google reads headings to map your topic structure and to pull featured snippets, which are often lifted straight from a well-formed H2 and the text beneath it
• Screen-reader users navigate by headings — a broken hierarchy makes a page genuinely hard to use, and accessibility is increasingly a ranking-adjacent signal
• Scanning readers use headings to decide whether to stay; a clear outline lowers your bounce rate
• Keyword-relevant headings reinforce what the page is about without any stuffing

Structure before style — a habit I learned in the design tools

I came up through design before the web, on Aldus FreeHand and CorelDRAW, and those tools taught me a distinction people still get wrong today: the difference between something that looks like a heading and something that is one. A junior would make a title big by dragging the point size up. It looked right and it was structurally meaningless — nothing in the document knew it was a heading, so nothing could act on it. The professional defined it as a heading and let the size follow from that.

Heading hierarchy on a web page is that identical discipline. An H2 is not “bold text that is a bit larger.” It is a structural declaration — this begins a main section — that Google, screen readers, and your table of contents all rely on. When people use an H3 because they liked the size, they are dragging the point size up again, forty years later, and breaking the structure to do it. Choose the heading level for what the content is in the outline, and let the styling follow. Structure first, appearance second. That order has not changed since I was setting type.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

Step 1: Fix the H1 first

Confirm each page has exactly one H1 — in most WordPress themes the post/page title is the H1, so do not add a second one inside your content. If your theme wrongly outputs multiple H1s, that is a template issue worth fixing once at the theme level.

Step 2: Rebuild the outline with the block editor

Go through the content and set section headings as H2, sub-points as H3, and so on — never skipping a level. The block editor makes this quick: select a Heading block and set its level. Use the editor’s document/outline view to see the structure at a glance and catch the skips.

Step 3: Demote the fake headings

Find any text that was made a heading only for its size and convert it to a paragraph with appropriate styling. If you want large, emphasised text that is not a section, style a paragraph — do not borrow a heading level it has not earned.

Step 4: Verify the fix

1. Use the block editor’s outline view, or a browser heading-outline extension, to confirm a clean, unbroken hierarchy
2. Check there is exactly one H1 and no skipped levels
3. Clear your WordPress cache if you’re using a caching plugin
4. Re-run the SEO Roadmap audit, then check Google Search Console after a few days

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Adding a second H1 inside content when the page title already is one
• Skipping levels — jumping from H2 to H4 because the H3 size looked wrong
• Using headings as a styling shortcut for large text
• Cramming keywords into every heading until they read as engineered rather than descriptive

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.