Heading structure

What heading structure work is

Heading structure work is the correction of the headings across a site: their wording, so each one describes the section beneath it, and their markup, so the levels form a proper outline rather than a set of font choices. It is done as a batch, page after page, and it changes almost no body text.

It is not page structure and headings, which is the deeper job on a single page: reordering the content itself so the answer arrives first. That one moves the furniture. This one fixes the signs on the doors, across every room in the building, and leaves the furniture where it is.

The distinction matters when you are buying. If one important page is in the wrong order, buy the reordering. If forty pages carry headings chosen for their appearance, buy this.

When you need it

You need it when the headings on your site were set by whoever built the pages rather than by whoever wrote them. The usual symptoms are visible in the page itself: a heading that reads “Quality you can trust” above a paragraph about delivery times, a section title of one word, or a heading that is really a strapline.

The second symptom is invisible without looking at the code. Pages with two or three H1 headings because the logo, the page title and the first section all use the same tag. Pages that jump from an H2 to an H4 because the smaller size looked better. Pages where a pull quote is a heading and a real section title is a bold paragraph.

You do not need this if your site is fewer than a dozen pages and one person wrote and marked up all of them. Then the fix is a morning's work by you, and the useful purchase is an audit saying which pages deserve attention at all. You also do not need it if the pages say the wrong things; headings cannot rescue an argument that is not there.

What gets fixed

• One H1 per page, and the right one. The H1 states the subject of the page. The logo is not it, the navigation is not it, and no page gets two.
• Levels that descend in order. H2 for a section, H3 for a part of that section, and no skipping. A machine reading the outline and a person tabbing through it both rely on the sequence being honest.
• Wording that describes. Every heading rewritten so that reading the headings alone, in order, tells you what the page contains. Clever, one-word and slogan headings are replaced with plain ones.
• Headings that are not headings. Bold paragraphs doing a heading's job get marked up properly. Pull quotes and decorative lines marked as headings get demoted.
• Consistency across the set. Pages of the same type end up with the same heading pattern, so a reader who has used one of your service pages can use all of them.

There are two reasons to do this and they pull in the same direction. A screen reader user navigates a page by jumping between its headings, and a broken outline makes that impossible; this is the single most common accessibility failure on small business sites, and it is one of the cheapest to correct. Search engines read the same outline to work out what a page covers and which part answers which question. The heading that helps a blind reader find the pricing section is the heading that gets that section quoted.

What you get

The heading sheet. One spreadsheet, one row per heading: the page address, the current level and wording, the corrected level and wording, and a short note where the change needs a judgement call rather than a rule.

The outline check. A per-page view showing the heading outline before and after, so the person applying the changes can see at a glance whether the page now reads as a sequence.

The pattern. One page describing the heading pattern for each page type on your site, written so your own writers can follow it on everything published afterwards. This is what stops the problem returning.

A worked example

An illustration. A Winnipeg accounting practice has sixty-eight pages: nine service pages, four team pages, a fee page and the rest a blog going back six years. Every page carries two H1 headings, because the template marks the practice name as one. The service pages use headings like “Our approach”, “Peace of mind” and “Next steps” on all nine, in that order, whatever the service is.

The pass corrects the template H1 once, which fixes all sixty-eight pages in a single change. The nine service pages get headings naming what is underneath: “What a compilation engagement covers”, “What you need to send us each year”, “What it costs and how it is billed”. Fourteen blog posts turn out to have no headings at all below the title, and are given three or four each. Eleven posts are marked as not worth the work and left. The pattern page describes three page types, and the practice's office manager has used it on every post published since.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages you have, what built them, and who will apply the changes once they exist. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Priced per page, with the count agreed before anything starts.
3. The crawl. Every heading on every page pulled into one sheet, with its level. Template problems show up immediately, because they repeat on every row.
4. The rewriting. Sixty to eighty pages take about two weeks. Template fixes are delivered first, because one change often corrects the whole site.
5. Delivery. The heading sheet, the outline check and the pattern page, with a short call to walk your writer through the pattern.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on the number of pages and on how much of the problem lives in the template, since a template fix is one job rather than sixty. It is nearly always bought alongside title tags and meta descriptions, because both come from the same crawl and the second costs less when the first has already been done. The pricing page shows the four published ways of working, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

A corrected outline makes two later jobs cheaper. Snippet optimisation shapes the paragraph under a heading so it is the one lifted onto the results page, and it needs the heading to be honest first. Internal linking is the usual next site-wide pass, now that it is clear what each page is about. Where the headings revealed a page whose sections are in the wrong order, the reordering job handles that one page properly. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.