3 Reasons Why Grammar Matters for Your Content

The following is an excerpt from my new book, A Proofreader’s Guide to Business Writing. You can pick up a copy here.

There are many areas in life where it’s good enough to be “good enough.” For example, it makes no sense to agonize over a casual text to a friend to ensure there are absolutely no errors or typos before you hit send. It’s informal communication; no one’s expecting perfection.

Likewise, you wouldn’t spend an hour debating whether to buy the name-brand can of tomato sauce or the less expensive store brand (hint: just buy the store brand—it’s probably canned on the same line anyway).

But when it comes to your business’s content, “good enough” is never good enough. And this is especially the case for websites and other online content. Simply put, if you want to enhance your brand’s credibility in the eyes of your customers and become known as an expert in your industry, having high-quality online content is crucial.

The bottom line is if you’re going to engage with customers online, that means using written content. If you’re not proofreading it (whether yourself or hiring it out), you’re potentially leaving tiny little land mines all over your website, blog, advertising, and social media content just waiting to go off and damage your business.

Enhancing Credibility and Image

No matter how good your content is, even small errors can chip away at your credibility and image. Why? Because it plants seeds of doubt in readers’ minds.

This is not a new revelation. Many companies invest a lot of time and money in creating quality content. They hire marketing companies to craft just the right message with just the right tone. They hire writers to compose optimized blog posts.

Yet so many businesses don’t think about the importance of proofreading in publishing excellent content. By the time you’ve finished this short book, I hope you’ll have made the decision to no longer be this kind of business!

I saw a painfully funny example of this a few years ago. A local pizzeria was looking to hire a shift manager. They published a small Facebook ad to find candidates. There was a small problem, though: the pay rate was listed at $50K per day! Clearly, they meant to write “$50K per year,” but I wonder how many candidates were sorely disappointed when they realized they wouldn’t become a millionaire within a month of starting the job!

Quality content shows you take your business seriously. If you have excellent copy—literally crossing every T and dotting every I—it projects to your customer base that you’re on top of things.

I’m a guitar player. One of my favorite brands is Paul Reed Smith. PRS is well known for their incredibly high quality standards. The great thing is, you can easily verify this for yourself. If you remove a pickup from the guitar or take off the electronics cover, you’ll be able to look at parts of the guitar that were never intended to be seen. Even there, you’ll see a dedication to quality and detailed work. Now, if they paid that much attention to parts of the guitar most players never even see, what message does that send about the attention paid to the parts you can see? As a result of their passion for quality, they’ve grown into one of the biggest guitar companies in the US.

I’m not suggesting that implementing a proofreading process in your business will be the key that catapults you to the top of your industry, but I am suggesting it’s an important piece of the puzzle. Like the inside of a PRS guitar, proofreading shows you value excellence all the way to even the most seemingly insignificant of details.

Improving Readability and Reader Engagement

Website readability is key to user experience—something so important it has its own field of study (UX Design)—and in turn affects user retention rates.

There are literally millions of websites on the internet, and now with social media, our collective attention span is growing ever shorter. If a potential customer visits your website only to find it hard to read, riddled with errors, or full of mistakes, how long do you think they’ll stay on your site? They’re probably going to bail, returning to their search results for another business to meet their needs.

And even if they do continue to interact with your online content, errors, typos, and incorrect grammar can all distract readers, detracting from the quality of your products and services and instead helping to create an overall negative impression of your brand.

Enhance SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Having a credible website is one of the keys to having a successful online presence. SEO optimization is no longer about merely stuffing a list of keywords into a blog post and calling it a day. Search engines like Google now account for things like readability and flow as well.

In fact, Google has enacted recent algorithm updates designed to give search results preference to content that’s likely to be the most useful to the customer. This means writing well-researched content that fully answers customers’ questions, but it also means using correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

For instance, if you own a company that sells tires, and one of your display ads is all about the discounts available to your customers when they purchase a new set of “tiers,” how many customers will you lose as a result? While it may be unfair, some customers are likely to think, “If they can’t even spell the word ‘tires’ correctly, what else can’t they do?”

Spelling errors and typos can also cause your website to lose page rank and fall below your competitors in search engine results pages (SERPs). Visitors tend not to stay on a website for long if they’re forced to endure poor grammar, spelling mistakes, or generally bad writing.

On the other hand, if you have online content that flows smoothly, reads easily, and engages with your audience, your website’s credibility will rise. Search engines will take notice of this fact, and as more people are directed to and visit your website, your SEO results will improve.