In this article, I am going to show you how poor grammar affects your website. There is no doubt that having good grammar skills is something that was required for us when we were at school. The thing is, that once we finish our careers, and enter the business world, we tend to be more relaxed regarding grammar.

This is especially true in today’s world where instant communication has required us to respond quickly, without “wasting” time on stuff like capital letters, punctuation, and even spelling. We have grown so accustomed to using this sort of shorthand that we even use emoticons instead of words.

All of this has been so widely used that people think that it’s a norm to do it. The thing is, that this bad habit of writing reflects and denotes more than what we might think in a very bad way about us.

According to James Hammond, who works as Operations Manager at EduGeeksClub writing service, proper grammar is absolutely essential in the business world: “Poor grammar doesn’t just show the lack of attention to detail, but it can also be a cause of misunderstandings, and it can slow down the productivity of a company. The way we communicate is more important that you think.”

Grammar is the structure of our language; the inflection and syntax that ties our words together and gives them meaning. Whether you’re a working professional or a creative individual, good grammar, both written and verbal, can drastically alter your success as both an employee or a business person.

Grammar & Spelling

One of the main purposes of a business website is to establish trust and credibility with your site visitors. Grammatical errors, typos, and spelling mistakes don’t establish trust in the same way that well-written copy does.

The direct impact of poor grammar and spelling on page rank is most measurable in links and bounce rates. The overall quality of the content on your site will lead to more visitors and an increase in page views, affecting your page rank in a positive way. Poorly written content will reduce both links and the amount of time visitors spend on your site – all of which are important factors in Google’s page rank algorithm.

Indirectly (but perhaps even more importantly), poorly-written content can cause your visitors to question your ability to clearly communicate a message. Your website’s content is frequently the first communication you’ll have with a potential client. Demonstrating a strong command of language will foster both trust and credibility.

Good Grammar can Improve Your Business

Business people are required to produce a significant amount of written material. We are not just talking about emails we send out to our partners but also about business proposals, contracts, presentations, speeches, brochures, and even your company’s official website.

If any of these have poor grammar in them, it will reflect negatively on you and your business. Business partners will view it as a lack of effort or attention to detail, and will be inclined to think you’re treating your partnership the same way. Your potential business partners will also view poor grammar skills in a negative light. Great writing with good grammar will help present your business as reliable and trustworthy.

Good Grammar Can Boost Productivity

Yes, good grammar skills can make your company conduct its business more smoothly. Bad grammar is often a source of miscommunication and misunderstandings, and when you try to remedy such a situation, you are wasting valuable time trying to solve a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

A good rule of thumb would be to set up clear writing guidelines and have all of your employees stick to them in order to save time and avoid potential confusion. Instructions clearly laid out with proper grammar make it possible for all members of the company to perform as efficiently as possible, without having to write additional emails or require further explanations about their assignments.

Website spelling and grammar errors are costlier than you may think

In a research by web services comparison site Website Planet reports that U.S. businesses with bad grammar and spelling mistakes on their websites will lose almost double the number of potential customers than those with typo-free sites.

The analysis of more than 5,000 site visits over a two-week period showed that the bounce rate —the percentage of visitors who leave a website after only looking at a single page—on landing pages with sloppy spelling and grammar was 85% more than those that were correctly written and spell-checked.

And not only do nearly twice as many potential customers or clients leave, the research found that they leave quicker, too. The time on site was reduced by 8%  on landing pages with deliberate typos and grammatical errors placed in them.

And the damage doesn’t stop there…

The longer-term outcome of people quickly leaving a website is that it’s penalized by Google because one of the metrics Google uses to rank your site is the bounce rate. High bounce rates signal to Google that a site is not trustworthy and therefore lowers its position in the organic Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

The same principles, and much the same results, apply to Google Ads: the research found that web visitors are 70% less likely to click on Google Ads with a spelling or grammar mistake. Since these ads receive fewer clicks, Google also lowered their position and charged:

• 72% more for ads with grammar errors
• 20% more for ads with spelling mistakes

It’s crystal clear that bad spelling and grammar can have a powerful impact on a company’s bottom line. The fact that businesses lose nearly nine in 10 more visitors to their websites because of typos should be a serious point to take care of. To make matters worse, visible typos make a site less visible on Google because it lowers their position in the search engine results pages.

Poor Grammar and SEO

When dealing with SEO, poor grammar can and is proven to, have a negative impact on business. People of all ages and education levels respond better to content that is error-free and grammatically correct. SEO focuses on attributes of a business that correlate with positive engagements that are free of errors and accurate. Without these attributes, the company can be misinterpreted, misrepresented, or not taken seriously in their approach to detailed matters.

• Links: Always keep writing good content in your website. This is a good advice for ranking well and attracting natural links—but nobody wants to link to a bad website. They want to link to reputable sources. Spelling and grammatical mistakes make you look like a dumb-dumb, not an authority.

• User Experience: There’s another reason that pages with poor grammar and typos aren’t as likely to rank—the consumer! Google is always trying to improve user experience, and this can affect rankings. Web pages that don’t provide a good user experience aren’t as likely to rank well in the search engines. And if you came across a page riddled with typos and grammatical mistakes, would you want to stay and look around? No.

What does Search Engines do about this?

Search engines such as Google and Bing approach bad grammar and misspelled words in several different ways. These search engines may not have exact algorithms that measure poor grammar and misspelled words, but they do have meticulous algorithms that monitor user experience.

Bad grammar will ultimately cause a bad user experience, causing a person to have less trust in a company and be less informed. Users who leave a website or content quickly because of poor grammar and misspelled words are creating negative search engine optimization value for a business, hurting the representation of a business amongst their competition. Less trust and representation equals less money for a business.

Problems caused by Bad Grammar:

• Unclear Communication
• Creates a Poor First Impression
• Lessens Productivity
• Reduces Chance of Success
• Makes Life Harder
• Grammatical errors are distracting.
• Grammatical errors interfere with clarity.
• Too many little errors will make you seem careless.

Benefits of Good Grammar:

• Saves Time.
• You can efficiently and accurately convey your message.
• Helps you to appear confident, intelligent, and refined to others.
• The more comfortable you are with good grammar, the more you can focus on other issues.
• Saves Job: Good grammar reflects a “level of professional competency.”

Proofreading Tips

Once you finish writing any kind of copy in your website, try to implement the following tips…

Walk away.
Stepping away from your writing for even 15 minutes after completion will help create some much-needed distance between the work you just created and any mistakes. This will give you the opportunity to clear your mind so that you can approach your work from a fresh perspective and will allow you to see what you actually wrote versus what you think you wrote.

Grab a fresh set of eyes.
Enroll a straight-talking friend, family member, or colleague to give your work a once-over. If you don’t have anyone that fits the bill, professional proofreaders are readily available.

Read it out loud.
Reading your work out loud (if you can print it out on paper, even better) will help you catch run-on sentences and misplaced words.

Read it backward.
Start from the last sentence and work your way to the beginning. Your brain knows what you intended to write and will be prone to seeing what it wants to see. Reading it in reverse order will provide clarity.

CONCLUSION

Finally, we can say that grammatical errors affect content marketing not only at a reader’s level, but at SEO level as well. Poor grammar may result in three main areas: loss of credibility, user experience, and search rankings.

Credibility
Poor grammar can tarnish the credibility of blogs, eBooks, case studies, how-to guides, and other digital marketing resources. This damaged credibility can lead to the loss of potential customers and affect your bottom line directly, which makes proper grammar an imperative to any business’s online success.

User Experience
Improperly structured sentences usually take more time to fully decipher–many readers will simply give up in the middle of an awkwardly structured sentence. Proper grammar is an integral part of the readability of an article, a component which is necessary for a positive user experience. Therefore, a grammatical error can easily result in a loss of interest for the reader, which hinders the effectiveness of the content.

Rankings
You already know that grammar can hurt a piece of content’s credibility and user experience.

Google punishes grammar and spelling errors

Google will rank your page lower in the search results if it finds grammar and spelling mistakes. Google’s ranking algorithm values well-written content over error-ridden content, so basic writing mistakes could cost you precious spots in search engine rankings. This could drastically reduce your site’s visibility and spell disaster for your company.

Bing

Bing has been clear that grammar is unquestionably a ranking factor that its search engines look for when determining the quality of content on the web. In February of 2014, the Senior Product Manager of Bing, Duane Forrester stated:

“Just as you’re judging others’ writing, so the engines judge yours. If you struggle to get past typos, why would an engine show a page of content with errors higher in the rankings when other pages of error free content exist to serve the searcher? Like it or not, we’re judged by the quality of the results we show. So we are constantly watching the quality of the content we see.”

It’s evident that Bing is part of the ever-growing “Grammar Police,” and even though Google hasn’t confirmed their stance on grammar, it’s likely that it is already a ranking factor.

Customers might think you just don’t care
Nobody wants to make spelling mistakes and commit grammar faux pas. But, when you have several typos on your website and don’t fix them for weeks or months, it makes readers think that you don’t care enough about your website to actually read it. This hurts the authority of the information on your site. After all, if you can’t be bothered to read your website, why should a consumer?