H2 Enough? Or are H3+ headers worth it?

quantumtoast

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Hello!

Been working to create evergreen content in my niche for a few weeks now, focusing on making sure these pieces are bulletproof.

Today when looking at the top 10 google search results for a '27 best xyz,' style article, and saw that every single article kept the outline structure to no deeper than H2 tags.

I'm wondering is this a new phenomenon? Are these players just large enough that this is all that's required to rank? Or does the 'top XYZ,' article article archetype naturally favor a shallower outline and user journey?

Thanks in advance!
 
About 10 years ago you definitely wanted to use 'every tag possible' h1-h4, bold, italic, underline, every semantic variation of every keyword etc etc. You could get some pretty awful content to rank using that kind of strategy.

I think these days what's on the page in terms of quality and authority matter a lot more than how aggressively you mark it up. Like you I've seen big brands and successful sites going less deep with headings so I tend to only use deeper headings if they're genuinely needed - sometimes they do make sense - but I don't go forcing myself to use H4 anymore...
 
Steve Brownlie said:
but I don't go forcing myself to use H4 anymore...
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Same. I will rarely ever go into H4's unless the article structure forces me, and many times I'll reorganize things to get away from it. I'm routinely, in like 95%+ of my articles go as deep as H3.

I don't think it's a make it or break it kind of thing. I would simply do what is best for the content and the user and not do anything artificial for the sake of some 0.00001% algorithm-weighted variable.
 
I think it's more important to have keywords in H2 than to have H3s.

For me, I think I've used too many H3s in the attempt to keep structure, where H2 would give better results for SEO.
 
I don't force myself to use them, but due to how structured most of my articles are, most of them use H3's and a lot use H4's. I don't use H4's for ranking purposes, more that it satisfies my personality.

I generally don't allow H4's to be auto-listed/generated into a table of contents plugin these days as often it causes issues with over-optimization.
 
illmasterj said:
I generally don't allow H4's to be auto-listed/generated into a table of contents plugin these days as often it causes issues with over-optimization.
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If you have a collapsed/hidden table of contents but your primary keyword is in the table of contents multiple times, can google still read it? If so, I think my pages are all overoptimized man.
 
Éowyn said:
If you have a collapsed/hidden table of contents but your primary keyword is in the table of contents multiple times, can google still read it? If so, I think my pages are all overoptimized man.
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Yes, they can read it. It's typically either hidden through CSS or Javascript or jQuery which are just manipulating CSS. And CSS only works on HTML content that is inside the source code of the page. And if it's in the source code, Google can read it as can any other browser or crawler. And yes, it counts even when it's hidden.
 
Éowyn said:
If you have a collapsed/hidden table of contents but your primary keyword is in the table of contents multiple times, can google still read it? If so, I think my pages are all overoptimized man.
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Yes, as Ryu says this is still visible to Googlebot.

Go and use any "content auditor" tool (I like Website Auditor by SEO Powersuite) for your target keyword and you will probably find that the post title (H1) + adding it to the body text + using it in even a few sub-headings + the sub-headings being in the TOC is causing over-optimization.
 
Wow - thanks all. Great insights - hugely appreciated.

Will keep an eye to see how these same guys treat other content pieces but a lot of what's said explains what I saw.
 
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