Your H2 doesn't match the query — that's the whole problem

Your H2 doesn't match the query — that's the whole problem

Spotted across a batch of near-miss pages — ranking top-five but never grabbing the box, the common thread was an H2 that paraphrased the query instead of mirroring it. 'Understanding shipping costs' loses to a rival's literal 'How much does shipping cost?'

Google reportedly leans hard on heading-to-query lexical match to decide what's extractable.

Why it matters: the cheapest snippet win in your library is a heading rewrite. Find pages ranking 3-6 for question queries, change the nearest H2 to phrase the exact question, drop the 40-word answer right beneath it. People are flipping these in under a week. Watching this.