You may already know that poor grammar online can negatively affect your agency’s search engine optimization, especially if you’ve read our previous blog on this subject. However, you may not realize that these seemingly minor errors can actually have even further consequences for your brand’s reputation and your business’ success overall.

In order to help you understand the importance of these issues, here are some more details on you could be getting in the way of your own success by not making sure your content is free of errors.

Poor grammar and your brand: It’s not only the search engines that care about the quality of your content. If your content is of poor quality, people will doubt the quality of your products, your services, and your company overall. If you can’t spend the time to double check your work, why should you expect prospects to read what you have to say or buy your products and services?

• A 2013 study of over 1,000 people conducted by Disruptive Communications revealed that online users care about content quality. In fact, 40% of the study’s participants stated that poor spelling and grammar decreased their positive impression of a brand.
• That same study also found that poor spelling and grammar on social media is the number one factor that can damage a reader’s opinion of a brand. 42.5% of respondents listed this as the top factor, above other reasons, including posts that are too sales focused, too frequent, are trying too hard to be funny, or are not frequent enough.
• Poor grammar can make it difficult for your audience to read and understand your content, take away from your company’s message and credibility, and increase the chance of negative word-of-mouth marketing that is spread about your brand. Your company’s online presence and content should help your brand reputation, not hurt it! Take the extra few minutes to double check your work, or have someone else read it over. It will definitely pay off in the long-run.

Poor grammar and your bottom line: Not only will prospects think less about your company’s brand due to these errors, but they will in turn be less likely to become (or remain as) customers. This includes errors not only on your website, but also in social media posts, emails, and anywhere else you are communicating through the written word.

• It’s been found that almost 60% of consumers would choose not to do business with a company that allowed typos, misspelled words, or grammar mistakes on their website.
• In an industry such as insurance, where consumers are expected to provide personal information through online forms, typos and other errors can raise red flags of the site’s credibility. If people cannot trust your website, they won’t trust your business.
• Studies have shown that one single spelling mistake can effectively decrease a company’s online sales by half. That means taking the time and resources to double check everything you send out is much more than worth it in the long-run for your agency.

Especially when it comes to the success of your business, it really does pay to check your grammar. Improving your brand’s content can help improve search engine ranking, opinions about your brand, and in turn, your sales and profits. Why let poor grammar get in the way of your success?