In praise of subheadings

If part, or indeed, all of your role is dedicated to editing stuff, you’ll know that it’s always a disappointment to receive drafts which look a bit like this:

Long, continuous spools of unbroken prose. Urgh.

In other words, as editors, we can soon find ourselves facing sorting the equivalent of this, out:

Extra time now has to be spent working out what the overall piece is about, before we are left to decide where any H2s etc might be best placed. We, as editors, bear the brunt of a turning a poor reading experience into something more wonderful; by suffering this content in its raw state first.

Maybe the raw material is a brilliant piece of content in need of a just light touch edit. Maybe it’s got a great, irresistible hook deeply buried within…whatever the case, the one thing you can be sure of is that readers won’t hang around if they can’t comfortably read and digest the words.

…yet I’ve personally seen them being underused, misused - or even completely absent from some of the content I’ve been tasked with editing and shaping over the years.

So here’s a quick rundown of why using subheadings is so helpful - for everyone.

1. Subheadings make content easier to digest

When a subheading for each part of the content is present, your readers know pretty instantly what that section is going to cover.

They break up the overall structure into manageable chunks that allow our brains to quickly ‘skim’ and scan, until we find the most interesting and relevant sections for us.

And where a subheading follows straight under a main title, it can sometimes function as the sentence that ‘explains’ an abstract or cryptic headline to the reader:

Scanning pieces of content is a behaviour we’ve all naturally adopted, and we’re far better able to do this when subheadings are properly used. Without them, we’d struggle to navigate through a lengthy piece of prose, we’d spend more time reading - or even give up reading altogether, after just a short time.

It’s an important ‘shortcut’ for us, as there’s so much content out there. We need to be able to quickly judge the quality and relevance between, say, five different articles which all cover the same topic.

2. Subheadings can make impactful points - all on their own

They can literally act like small-scale newspaper headlines. They can keep someone engaged, even if they found a previous section a bit boring or irrelevant.

Subheadings can tease, reveal, lead, answer, state... they can be powerful enough to keep a reader…reading.

3. Subheadings keep us - the content creator - on track

Whether you’re an editor or a content writer crafting a piece from scratch, using subheadings can be a lifesaver when you’re first faced with an empty page. Drafting some subheadings at this point is almost like laying a foundation (or putting up some scaffolding), and helps you mitigate against the prospect of a messy first draft which lacks a proper structure, or perhaps accidentally focuses way too much on some points - and over others you meant to include.

Subheadings can help you stitch together the ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’ of a piece of content, and ensure that the finished piece flows well.

Lastly, subheadings can prevent you from going off on a tangent. Avoiding going off-topic ultimately saves you precious writing and editing time, and allows you to keep your piece on point.

4. Subheadings are still good for SEO

Although (arguably) they do not influence how your website content ranks on search engines as much as they may have done in days gone by, using them in a ‘best practice’ manner within your content is still the way to go. They’re still going to be crawled by those relentless search engine ‘spiders’, and in this sense, H tags still count as components which contain important information for users searching for specific content.

“We do use H tags to understand the structure of the text on a page better” 

John Mueller, Google

So it goes without saying that, when you’re about to publish a page, you should make sure that all headings and subheadings are specified in your CMS using the appropriate tags (i.e. <H1>, <H2>, and so on).

For a more in-depth look at headings / subheadings and their potential impact on SEO, take a look at this helpful article.

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