Many businesses often take writing for granted. Whether unintentional or not, poor grammar, bad spelling or sub-par content can reflect poorly on your business. It can even cause you to lose customers.
If you’re not a natural copywriter, it can be difficult to distil your ideas into an attention-grabbing headline or a concise 140-character tweet.
The reality is: writing matters. A great deal.
There’s no place for spelling mistakes and bad grammar in your business communications, website or marketing material. Yet, businesses often end up with gaffes such as its for it’s or your for you’re. Worse, the wrong choice of words could go against their brand identity.
Here are five ways bad writing could affect your business.
1. Poor content can tarnish your brand’s image
Every written word on your website or on your marketing collaterals is a reflection of your brand identity. It is important to cultivate that brand image through consistent positioning and messaging on all your content channels.
A poor written effort that is not coherent with your brand image can send an inconsistent message to your customers. Poor content leaves a bad impression and it can cost you your brand’s reputation.
2. Hard-to-understand content can drive away customers
A brochure that makes no sense, web content that is written in a language that is too convoluted, instructions that are too technical or an article that is full of jargon can be a huge turn-off for readers. They may decide that it’s not worth giving you business.
You only have a small window of opportunity to grab someone’s attention. Don’t waste it. Keep your writing simple and easy-to-read.
3. Sloppy writing shows you cannot be trusted
A brochure with punctuation errors, an email littered with spelling mistakes or a blog full of grammatical blunders show one thing: that you cannot even be bothered to check your writing before you print it, email it or post it.
This can make your business look unprofessional. And it hardly inspires confidence in your company, your brand or your products.
4. Terrible writing can result in negative word of mouth
Great copywriting can do wonders for your business. A useful how-to blog post or a cleverly-written ad can generate buzz on social media and result in positive comments about your business, products or services.
But the opposite is also true. A terribly written piece could result in negative word of mouth or worse, make your the business the subject of ridicule on social media.
5. Poor grammar and spelling can affect your SEO rankings
If you have a blog or a website, you’ll know that search engine rankings matter. Many elements go into the algorithm that determines how your page is ranked.
Reliability, usefulness and helpfulness of a website are key. And one of the ways in which to improve user experience is by ensuring that your website uses proper grammar and spelling.
Matt Cutts, Google’s search engine expert, has been repeatedly asked whether spelling and grammar matter when it comes to evaluating content and site quality. In this 2011 Google Webmaster video, he says that “the ability to spell correlates relatively well” with the PageRank of a page.
Indeed, in assessing the quality of a page or article, Google’s Panda algorithm considers whether the article has “spelling, stylistic or factual errors”.
In short: reputable sites tend to spell better. On the other hand, lower page ranked sites tend not to spell as well.
Bottom line: quality copywriting sets your business apart
The professionalism of your business is reflected in your website and in the content you produce. Giving your customers the best impression of yourself through quality copywriting is absolutely vital to set you apart from your competitors.
Make it a priority to banish common grammar and spelling mistakes. Use your spell checker. And always proofread, proofread and proofread.
But if you’re still struggling to come up with error-free content that has the “wow” factor, perhaps it’s time to outsource your copywriting to a Singapore copywriter.
If you do not have the time nor desire to write, getting a professional copywriter to do the job for you is a better way to get results.
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