Entities in H3 Tags counts how many times your run’s entities appear across the page’s H3 subsection headings. It is a raw occurrence count of the H3 text zone, so every repeat adds to the total — and a higher count relates to, but never guarantees, a stronger position within a measured result set.
| Factor ID | RG-ENT-005 |
|---|---|
| Family | Entities |
| Measurement | Occurrence count |
| Measured zone | H3 text in the rendered page body |
What it measures
This factor counts entity occurrences across the page’s H3 subsection headings. H3s typically label the supporting points nested under a section, so the count reflects how often your run’s recognized entities — people, places, products, organizations, or concepts — surface in that secondary heading layer.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear extracts the H3 text from the rendered page body and sums case-insensitive, word-aware matches for every entity in the run. Each qualifying occurrence is added to the total, so an entity named in several H3s contributes several times. If there is no entity list, or none of the entities match, the factor returns 0.
What RankGear looks for
<h3>How Google ranks entities</h3>
<h3>Comparing BERT and RankBrain</h3>
<h3>What Google recommends for headings</h3>Across those three H3s, a run whose entities include Google, BERT, and RankBrain would count four occurrences — Google matches twice because the count is cumulative, not per-unique-entity.
| If the page’s H3s… | What the count reflects |
|---|---|
| Contain no run entities, or the run has no entity list | 0 |
| Name each entity once | One added to the total per H3 mention |
| Repeat the same entity across several H3s | The total rises with every occurrence |
How to optimize it
Use entities in H3s where they naturally label the supporting people, places, products, organizations, or concepts a subsection is actually about. Treat the count as an observation of how your heading structure already names its subjects, not as a target to inflate — adding H3s purely to raise the number tends to fragment the page without helping the reader.
Important considerations
- Repeated occurrences increase the count — the same entity named in multiple H3s is counted each time.
- The factor does not judge heading hierarchy; it only reads H3 text and does not check whether the H3s are nested correctly under their parent sections.
- The entities available to match depend on provider data, so a sparse or different entity set changes what can be counted.
- Do not create unnecessary subsections just to move this metric.
- This is a correlation-based prioritization signal within a measured result set; a higher count relates to position but does not make a page rank or guarantee any placement.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.