How using subheadings in your blog post benefits you and your readers
While subheadings may seem a pretty innocuous addition to blog posts, they actually play a pivotal role in the success of your blog. Read on to discover how something that seems so small and insignificant, provides benefits to you, your business and your reader.
Encourage people to read your blog posts
Clicking through to a website and finding yourself confronted by a solid wall of text is pretty off-putting, especially when you’re looking at it on a smaller screen, such as a phone or tablet.
Without subheadings, your blog post will look overwhelming and time-consuming to read. And, as the potential reader may not even know for certain if your article is going to contain the information they are hoping for, they are likely to click away and find another website to look at. There’s plenty out there, after all!
Getting someone to start reading your blog post is one of the biggest hurdles you need to overcome.
By breaking up the text and making the page look less of a chore to read, subheadings help to make your blog posts appealing and accessible. Plus, if you use descriptive subheadings, it helps your reader to quickly get an idea of what information they will find in the blog post, so they can quickly confirm whether they are in the right place or not.
Help your reader
People read differently when the text is online than when it is presented on paper, tending to skim read the content rather than looking at every word. In fact, research shows that the majority of people only read 20-28 per cent of the words on a webpage - and that will include your blog articles.
Subheadings help people to understand the structure and context of what they are skimming over, as well as alerting them to any particular sections of interest they may want to read more carefully.
Research also shows that by breaking up the text and creating more empty space on the page (which is called white space), subheadings make it easier for your reader to both read and understand what you have written.
Make it easier to write your blog
Before you start to write a blog post, create a list of all of the points you want to cover in it and put them into a logical order. Using these points as subheadings and writing each section up at a time will help you to easily create a well-structured article that makes sense, doesn’t waffle on and provides all of the information you need to.
Plus, many people find it makes it quicker to write their posts this way, as they don’t get stuck thinking about where to start or when deciding what should come next.
Improve your chances of appearing in search results
Search engines always try to provide their users with the best content possible in search results to try to retain their loyalty. They are businesses, after all!
So, to stand a chance of ranking highly in search results, you need to write high-quality, appealing articles that have a logical structure and are easy to read. And, as we’ve just covered, subheadings help you to do that.
Plus, one of the things that search engines count as an indicator of a low-quality website, or one that doesn’t deliver on what the visitors expect, is a high number of people who leave the site straight away (the bounce rate). By ensuring your blog posts are attention-grabbing, attractive and accessible, you’ll hopefully reduce the chances of this happening. Yet again, hello subheadings!
If you want to find out which kind of heading to use when and how to craft compelling headings, take a look at this blog post.
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