"Put keywords in every H2 to rank for them."

"Put keywords in every H2 to rank for them."

Mechanical and mostly wrong.

A how-to site rewrote H2s on 250 articles to force the target keyword and its variants into nearly every subheading. Control of 250 kept natural, question-style H2s. Goal: subheading keyword density.

Twelve weeks: the keyword-stuffed group gained 0.1 positions; the natural-question group gained 1.4 — and grabbed 31 new "People Also Ask" appearances the stuffed group didn't.

Why the question H2s won: they matched how people actually phrase queries, so Google pulled them into PAA and featured snippets. "How long does sourdough take to rise?" gets the snippet. "Sourdough Rise Time Sourdough" gets nothing but a headache.

Headers should map to the questions a reader has, in their words. That happens to be the format Google extracts for SERP features. Cramming the keyword in serves the myth and loses the snippet. The natural H2s did both jobs the stuffing couldn't.