How Important it is to Get Grammar and Spelling Right for Driving Traffic to your Blog
While going through some of the food blogs, I often come across several frustrating spelling and grammar issues. The kind that makes me want to pull my hair out. It has often made me think, if search engines judge you for your grammar and spelling; just like we people do?
Short answer, yes.
“. . . 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.” — Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Bing.
And this is what Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts had to say about the relevance of spelling and grammar for SEO, back in 2011.
Even though his comments are not as firm as Bing’s it can be assumed that since the Panda update, content quality needs to high to be loved by Google. And bad spelling and grammar are obviously problem areas in terms of creating quality content.
The cost of embarrassing web site errors, such as misspellings, has increased dramatically as search engines are placing a greater emphasis on proper writing — Seoworkers
So stop being sloppy about your writing and pay some attention to your language. Even if you were to completely disregard the effect on SEO, imagine the impression on your readers if you are confusing ‘their’ and ‘there’. Not very pleasant is it? And it can seriously impact the credibility of your blog, because now whoever is reading your content is thinking,
“That doesn’t look right!”
Even the people who do stick on, and continue to read, will be slowed down when there are repeated errors, and they will not be too enthusiastic about coming back to your website for a second read. Here is something that will give you a little more clarity on how damaging bad spelling and grammar can be for the identity of your blog.
And it’s not as difficult as it may seem initially. There are plenty of grammar and spell check apps and plugins you can use to check for errors in content.
Grammarly is one such app. It not only points out spelling errors but also gives you alerts when you are using an adverb in place of an adjective, or using a wrong form of the verb, and so on. It can also be used to check for plagiarism. So it’s a great way to make sure you are producing quality content.
Hemingwayapp is another great tool to check spelling and grammar and overall quality of the content.
Spell and Grammar Check by Ginger is another plugin that can help with this.
Although these apps and plugins are there, they can only do so much. There can be some alarming results if you rely too much on auto correct. So it is important that you consciously start paying attention to spelling grammar. Ask a friend to proofread your content. When you see that you are making similar errors, you can consciously try and change them in the future.
But it is a dangerous thing to ignore spelling and grammar. Quality, overall is compromised on. And Google and other search engines are now increasingly indexing based on the quality of content.
Another big disadvantage that incorrect spellings puts you in is in terms of keywords. Keywords are still an important factor in SEO, even though their relevance has significantly reduced. But it is still important to make sure that the keywords you are using are at least spelled right. Imagine if you spell ‘pasta’ as ‘pesta’, that’s a big keyword you are losing out on.
Most often these mistakes stem from a lack of editing and proofreading. After writing a post, it’s extremely tempting to just press publish and move on to other things. But this is a mistake and you should learn to stop yourself from being impatient.
Some time back it was a popular practice to deliberately misspell to nab a few grammatically inept searchers, it’s simply not worth the risk. This tactic was used by “SEO strategists” before the Google Algorithm became as smart as it is now. Now overuse of misspelled keywords is considered as spam. So forget about that giving you an SEO edge.
Furthermore, the evolution of autocorrect now has the ability to correct errors in keyword searches before, during and even after a search is executed. Check out what happens when I attempt to search for a misspelled Subaru “Forrester.” — Mudd.com
It may take you only a few minutes to proofread a post, but it will definitely go a long way in terms of SEO and overall content quality. And that, in turn will go a long way in making sure your traffic increases, and it will keep your readers coming back for more.
So before you hit ‘Publish’ the next time around, wait. Read. Read again.And only then allow the world to see your content.
