What are H1, H2 and H3 tags, and when should you use them?

Short answer

Headings label the sections of a page: H1 for the main subject, H2 for the main sections, H3 for sub-points within them. Use them to describe content, not to style text. Google says heading order does not matter for search, but it matters a great deal to people using screen readers, and descriptive headings help both.

Heading tags attract more rules than almost anything else in on-page SEO. One H1 only. Never skip a level. Always put the keyword in the H1. Some of that is good practice for readers. Very little of it is a ranking rule. Here is what actually matters.

What the tags are

HTML has six heading levels, <h1> to <h6>. They describe the structure of a page the way chapter titles and section headings describe a report.

H1. The main subject of the page. Usually the visible page title.
H2. The main sections. On this page, “What the tags are” is an H2.
H3. Sub-sections within an H2, when a section has distinct parts worth labelling.
H4 to H6. Deeper levels. Rarely needed on most pages.

What Google says

Google’s starter guide is relaxed about headings. It says that from Google Search’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order, and adds that having them in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers. It does not set a required number of H1s.

So headings are best understood as signals about what each section covers, and as structure for readers. A heading that clearly names what follows helps Google understand the page and helps a person scan it. A heading that says “Overview” or “More info” helps nobody.

Can you have more than one H1?

Yes. It is common and it is not a ranking problem. WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of the top million home pages found 18.1% had more than one H1. My own service and niche pages use three H1s on purpose, one for the page title and two marking the major chapter breaks further down, styled smaller than the main title.

What matters is that the main H1 clearly states what the page is about, and that any others mark genuinely major divisions. Ten H1s used because a theme styles them in a nice font is a different matter, and usually a sign the headings are being used for design rather than structure.

Why accessibility should decide most of this

The strongest argument for clean headings is not SEO. WebAIM’s survey of screen reader users found 71.6% navigate a long page by its headings first, from 1,539 respondents. For those readers, headings are the table of contents. Skipped levels and vague labels make a page harder to use.

The same WebAIM million analysis found skipped heading levels on 41.8% of home pages. That will not cost you rankings. It will cost some readers their way around your page.

The mistakes that actually cost something

Headings used for styling. Themes and page builders often wrap menus, footers, widget titles and button labels in H2 or H3 tags because the font size suits. The result is a page where the real section headings are lost among dozens of decorative ones. I found a header menu wrapped in H2 tags on one site and wrote it up in your header menu is wrapped in H2 tags.

No headings at all. Long service pages written as unbroken text, or with bold paragraphs instead of headings. Harder to read, harder to scan, and less clear to Google about what each part covers.

Headings that do not describe. “Why choose us”, “Our approach”, “Learn more”. Replace them with what the section actually says.

Keyword stuffing. The same phrase in every heading reads badly and Google’s guidelines treat excessive repetition as spam.

A simple way to write them

Write the page first. Then read only the headings, top to bottom. They should tell someone what the page covers and let them jump straight to the part they need. If the headings alone make sense as an outline, they are doing their job.

Put the main subject in the H1 in the words people search for. Use H2s for the questions or topics a reader would want answered, often phrased the way they would ask them. Use H3s only where a section genuinely splits into parts.

How to check your own pages

Browser extensions and most crawlers can list a page’s headings in order. Run that on your main templates. If the list starts with your menu items or ends with your footer widgets, the theme is using headings for styling, and the fix is in the template, once, rather than page by page.

Fixing heading structure rarely produces a dramatic ranking jump on its own. What it does is make every page clearer, for readers, for assistive technology and for Google, and that clarity compounds across a whole site. It is one of the cheaper improvements you can make, because it is usually a template change rather than a rewrite.

If your theme puts headings in the wrong places, or none at all, my technical SEO work fixes them at template level so the change applies everywhere at once.