Other than that, the heading structure is entirely under control of the publisher, site owner, or SEO.
Yet, having the keywords in the headings might not be enough because the purpose of heading elements is to communicate what a section of a web page is about and, as Mueller goes on to say, headings play a role for accessibility.
Google Says Fixing Headings Won’t Change Rankings
This is the part that some SEOs may find confusing because Google says that fixing the hierarchical structure of headings will not improve the rankings of a website.
A long time ago, like twenty four years ago, heading elements were a critical activity for ranking in Google. I know because I was an SEO in the early 2000s and experienced this first hand. By 2005 the impact to rankings had significantly diminished. I know it was diminished because I was a digital marketer when headings stopped making a critical impact and had evolved to become a signal of what a section of a web page is about.
The search results were full of sites that had no heading elements, it was hard not to notice the change.
But for some reason many in the SEO industry continued to believe that headings are a strong ranking factor. John Mueller’s statement about the diminished impact of heading elements to search rankings confirms the changed role that heading elements play today.
Mueller continued his answer:
“That said, if you have an existing site, fixing this isn’t going to change your site’s rankings; I suspect you’ll find much bigger value in terms of SEO by looking for ways to significantly up-value your site overall.”
What Mueller is talking about is the difference between making a web page for search engines (worrying about how Google will interpret heading elements) and creating a web page for users (worrying if the page contains useful information that is on-topic flows in a logical order).
His statement gives a clue to how Google uses heading elements and is good advice.
Read the discussion:
Non Sequential header tags?