Creating appealing,readable and well-formatted content that can be appreciated by both your target audience and search engines such as Google is important. It is a good SEO practice that yields great results,namely traffic!
So,what does scannable content mean?
Lets say you want to buy a book on Weight loss. The first thing that you will want to do is write down the key information that you are looking for e.g healthy cooking ideas,best workouts for weight loss,effective diets etc This will be your point of focus as you look for your best buy. You don't have time to go through all the content to determine if it's worthwhile.So what do you do? You glance over the book for headings,images,phrases etc that pertain to what you are looking for. This is what is called scanning.
In other words, scanning refers to both your audience and search engines being able to quickly determine the relevance of your content,in order to determine if it is worthwhile.
Importance of creating scannable content.
It provides great SEO value. Google,just like your audience,scans through your posts in order to understand them. If Google likes your posts,it then sends traffic your way. Imagine the numerous posts out there that Google has to go through-it's crazy! You need to use certain tips that make it easier for Google to scan through your posts. It can lead to faster rankings and also lots of traffic being sent your way.It makes it easier to understand and digest content by breaking it down. The average reader has a very low attention span. The truth is,very few of your readers will actually read through all your posts. They will look for sections that have the info that they need and discard the rest.