See your page’s heading outline at a glance. This free heading structure analyzer extracts every H1 to H6 from your HTML or Markdown and flags common SEO issues — a missing H1, multiple H1s, or skipped heading levels that hurt accessibility and crawling.
How to use the heading analyzer
Paste your page’s HTML, or Markdown headings written with # symbols. The tool builds an indented outline showing the hierarchy and lists any problems it finds. A clean structure uses one H1, then nests H2s and H3s logically without skipping levels — which helps both search engines and screen readers understand your content.
What a clean heading outline looks like
A heading structure is an outline, not a set of font sizes. Read a page’s headings on their own, in order, and they should summarise it well enough that someone could follow the argument without touching the body copy. One H1 states what the page is; H2s divide it into main sections; H3s break a section into its parts. Levels descend one step at a time and never skip.
This matters more than it used to. Screen readers navigate by heading level, so a broken outline makes a page genuinely difficult to use. AI assistants also lean on headings to locate the span of text that answers a question, which is why a question-shaped H2 or H3 sitting directly above a concise answer is one of the most reliable ways to get a passage quoted.
Common heading structure problems
Almost every failing outline comes from one of the following:
- More than one H1. Browsers tolerate it, but the page is left with no single statement of what it is about.
- Skipped levels. Jumping from H2 straight to H4 implies a section that is not there, and screen reader users hear a gap in the structure.
- Levels chosen for appearance. Picking H4 because it happens to be the right size breaks the outline. Set the level by meaning and restyle it with CSS.
- Empty or decorative headings. A heading wrapped around an icon, a divider or a one-word label adds a node to the outline that communicates nothing.
- Styled paragraphs doing a heading’s job. Bold 24-pixel text is not a heading to a screen reader or a crawler.
- Headings that do not describe their section. Overview and More information each occupy a slot in the outline without narrowing anything down.
Frequently asked questions
How many H1 tags should a page have?
Exactly one. The H1 is the page’s main title. Multiple H1s or no H1 can confuse search engines and assistive technology about the page’s primary topic.
Why do skipped heading levels matter?
Jumping from H2 to H4, for example, breaks the logical document outline. It can hurt accessibility for screen-reader users and makes your structure harder for search engines to interpret. Keep levels sequential.
Do headings affect SEO?
Yes, indirectly. Clear headings help search engines understand your content’s structure and topics, and they improve readability, which supports engagement and rankings.
Does styling text to look like a heading count?
No. Assistive technology and crawlers read the HTML element, not how it looks. A paragraph set in bold 24-pixel type reads as a heading on screen but does not appear in the document outline at all, so screen reader users cannot jump to it and search engines do not treat the text beneath it as a separate section. Use a real heading element at the correct level and change its appearance with CSS instead.