How Does Spelling & Grammar Impact Your Website’s SEO?

A long-debated subject in SEO is whether poor spelling and grammar can have a negative impact on your website’s SEO. If this is something that you are still unsure about, stick around and we’ll tell you everything you need to know…

Minor mistakes are OK

First of all, don’t stress too much if you know that your content writers are generally on the ball and provide high-quality content for you. The occasional spelling mistake, grammatical error, or punctuation faux pas isn’t going to result in penalisation or an inability to rank well.

That said, if you do spot errors, no matter how small, take note and ensure that they are corrected at your earliest convenience. Minor mistakes don’t hurt, but they can put certain people off.

It’s not a free pass to share low-quality content

Just because the occasional tiny mistake can fly under the radar it doesn’t mean that you have a free pass to share low-quality content. According to Google’s Advanced SEO guide for bloggers:

“One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

In other words, if you become too complacent and allow poor-quality content to take root, it will invariably have a negative knock-on effect on the rest of your website – so be ruthless.

Many internet users are put off by mistakes

One rather humbling statistic is that 70% of internet users said that they will be far less likely to click on an advert if there’s a spelling error. Sure, some people won’t even notice, however, those that do are less likely to trust you and will seek out one of your competitors instead.

So, even though the occasional spelling mistake isn’t necessarily a negative ranking factor, if it starts impacting your CTRs (click through rates), and overall conversions, it will invariably begin to have a negative impact on your SEO – albeit indirectly.

Spelling & grammar mistakes can potentially confuse Google

If you have spelling errors in your titles, meta, and keywords, then Google can sometimes get confused when crawling your website and will struggle to index your website appropriately (e.g., writing ‘SEO expert taxes’ rather than ‘SEO expert Texas’). As such, it is incredibly important that when working on your website and onsite optimization, you take the time to go over the critical SEO elements with a fine toothed comb.

Conclusion: Keep it tidy

Again, the occasional minor spelling and/or grammar mistake isn’t going to bring your entire operation tumbling down, but that’s no excuse to be lax about it. Keeping the quality of the content that you share nice and tidy is good practice.

Triple check your content and always keep an eye out for any potential errors on your published content – then make the necessary changes as soon as you can.

Just as you like to look clean and presentable when you leave the house in the morning, you should afford your website and the content that you share with your audience the same level of care and attention.