A heading is a line of text marked up with an HTML H1 through H6 element to signal a page’s document hierarchy — H1 for the main title, H2 through H6 for the nested sections beneath it.
| Term | Heading |
|---|---|
| Category | Page Structure and Technical SEO |
| Also known as | HTML Heading |
| Where it appears | Content Report and heading factors |
What it means in RankGear
RankGear reads headings when it builds the Content Report. During a crawl it extracts every H1 through H6 element from the rendered DOM, records each one’s level, text, and count, and turns them into heading factors — measurable inputs it can line up against your page and the pages currently ranking for the same query. So “Heading” here is not an abstract idea: it is the concrete set of H-tag elements RankGear actually found on the page, level by level.
How to interpret it
Read both presence and implementation, not just a tally. A page can carry the expected number of headings and still fall short — an H1 that renders empty, two competing H1s, a heading hidden by CSS or never reached during render, or a heading whose text says nothing about the topic. When you compare your heading factors against the ranking set, read the direction and the size of the gap: thinner or fewer headings than the pages that outrank you is a prompt to investigate your structure, not proof that adding headings will lift the page.
| Level | Typical role |
|---|---|
| H1 | The page’s single main title — usually one per page. |
| H2 | Major sections that divide the body of the page. |
| H3–H6 | Progressively nested subsections within each H2. |
Example
Say you run a Content Report for “cold brew ratio.” RankGear finds one H1 (“Cold Brew Coffee”) and three H2s on your page, while the top-ranking pages average one H1 and eight headings that each name a sub-step — grind size, water ratio, steep time, dilution. The heading factor surfaces that gap in structural coverage, pointing you toward the sub-sections your outline is missing rather than toward a raw heading count.
Important considerations
- Valid H1 through H6 nesting improves accessibility and machine readability, but technical conformance on its own does not guarantee rankings.
- A heading present in the HTML source can differ from what renders; RankGear reads the rendered DOM, so JavaScript-injected or CSS-hidden headings change what it records.
- Heading factors are comparative indicators drawn from the current ranking set for your query — they describe how your structure differs from those pages, not a score that Google assigns.
- Correlation is not causation: matching the heading pattern of top pages may correlate with ranking, but headings are one signal among the 870 factors, not the cause of the position.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.