Question on H2 & H3

[Hanuman]

I have a longish post I am working on (around 5000 words) that is extremely comprehensive on the subject. I am currently organizing the different headers in the article into groups (say, Price, Quality, etc.).

Now, these main sections (Quality, Price) are marked H2, and the actual headers ("Is X cheaper than Y") are marked as H3.

The alternate way to do this is to simply Bold 'Quality', "Price',etc. and mark these actual questions as H2.

Which one would you prefer from an SEO perspective?

If someone is searching for 'Is X Cheaper than Y', does it make a difference to Google that I answered it in a second-level header instead of the first?

 

[Ryuzaki]

If someone is searching for 'Is X Cheaper than Y', does it make a difference to Google that I answered it in a second-level header instead of the first?

Yes. The higher the header level, the more important the topic is to the article. The lower you go, the less important. It's like the difference between an elevator pitch and an hour long presentation. When you only have 30 seconds you hit the main points quickly. The higher headers (H1, H2) are the elevator pitch and the lower (H3 and down) are the nitty gritty details.

I've found myself in this predicament you've described before. Options are to create a CSS class that mocks it up to look like a nice header, just go ahead and use H2 on both, just bold it, etc. Really, the true answer is to restructure the articles in a way that does this better. An easy solution is to just drop the "Quality" and "Price" headers. They aren't really necessary. It's just us being overly organized, oftentimes.