H3 through H6 are the lower-level HTML heading tags used to mark nested subsections beneath a page’s H1 and H2 — the deeper tiers of a document’s outline, ordered from H3 (broadest) down to H6 (finest).
| Term | H3–H6 |
|---|---|
| Category | Page Structure and Technical SEO |
| Also known as | Lower-Level Headings |
| Where it appears | Content Report → Headings |
What it means in RankGear
In the Content Report’s Headings breakdown, RankGear inspects the H3 through H6 tags on a page alongside its H1 and H2. These lower levels are the deeper rungs of the outline: an H3 opens a subsection inside an H2 section, an H4 sits inside that H3, and so on down to H6. RankGear reads these headings from the rendered DOM, so it captures the tags the page actually produces after scripts run — not only what sits in the raw source — and it can line up their count and content against the pages already ranking for your query.
How to interpret it
Look at both presence and implementation, not just the count. A page can carry plenty of H3–H6 tags and still be poorly organized: headings that are empty, headings that repeat the same text, levels that skip a rung (an H4 with no H3 above it), or tags applied only to make text larger rather than to express real hierarchy. Weigh the depth of nesting against the ranking set — a heavily subdivided outline can signal a thorough, well-segmented treatment, while a page that stops at H2 may be leaving a detailed topic under-developed. Lower headings earn their keep most on long, reference-style pages where both readers and parsers need help navigating.
| Level | Typical role in the outline |
|---|---|
| H3 | A subsection within an H2 section |
| H4 | A point or sub-topic nested inside an H3 |
| H5 | A finer distinction within an H4 |
| H6 | The deepest heading level; rarely needed in practice |
Example
A troubleshooting guide uses an H1 for the page title and H2s for each major stage. Under the “Fix connection errors” H2, the author adds H3s for “Check the cable” and “Reset the router,” and under “Reset the router” an H4 for “Hold the reset button for 30 seconds.” RankGear finds each of these in the rendered DOM, reports how many H3–H6 tags the page has, and shows that the top-ranking competitors carry similar sub-structure — a hint that readers expect this level of detail broken out.
Important considerations
- Proper nesting matters more than raw quantity — a clean, sequential hierarchy communicates structure, whereas a large but disordered set of subheadings does not.
- Because RankGear reads from the rendered DOM, headings injected by JavaScript are counted, but a tag that is present can still be empty, duplicated, or hidden — presence alone is not quality.
- Well-formed lower headings improve accessibility and machine readability, but conforming markup does not by itself cause or guarantee rankings.
- Any comparison with competitor headings is a correlation-based, provider-scaled indicator of what ranking pages tend to do — not a Google score and not proof that adding headings will move a page.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.