Poor spelling can seriously affect your SEO
How do you feel about grammar and spelling mistakes? Irate, indifferent, in no way bothered? I ask because as a copywriter it bothers me big time. But maybe I’m being picky and pedantic and I should just get a life.
Thing is, I always equate poor grammar and spelling with sloppiness. To my mind if someone can’t be arsed checking these things then can they really be that bothered about their marketing. Or their business. Or their clients and customers. It’s not like it’s hard or time-consuming to do. Word and Google Docs have their own spelling and grammar check options and there are also free online resources like Grammarly.
I think bad grammar and spelling mistakes in your marketing can harm your credibility. It detracts from the rest of the content and could make you seem like less of an expert or authority. I mean, if the content appears to have been written by a child it’s difficult to take someone seriously.
But whatever your own view on the subject, your website is the one place you really need to pay attention to this kind of stuff. Why? Because it can mess up your SEO.
Suppose you’re a public health strategist but there’s a teeny typo on your web page and suddenly you’re all about pubic health. That’s going to confuse the hell out of Google when it’s trying to match search intent to the right websites. So – surprise, surprise – you may not get a whole lot of visitors to your site. Unless, of course, they’re looking for help with their nether regions.
‘We have to be able to recognise what a page is about. And if we can’t recognise that because there’s so many errors on the page in the text, then that makes it harder. The other aspect is also that we try to find really high-quality content on the web and sometimes it can appear that a page is lower-quality content because it has a lot of grammatical and technical mistakes in the text.’
So says John Mueller, Google’s webmaster trend analyst. And you can’t really argue with Google, can you?
Moral of the story – dun’t ferget too chock you’re spalling and gramer on yer webshite.
Want your web content to be word perfect? I’m here