Proper spelling and grammar is a must-have in the classroom, but is it a must-have online too? Will your search rankings be affected by how well you word things on your site?
Drive Traffic Media is a marketing agency in Orange County that answers all your questions.
Where’s the Proof of This?
We first see evidence of this in 2011. In a video done by Matt Cutts, who was then Head of Google’s Webspam Team, he states:
“[Proper spelling and grammar] is not used as a direct signal within our rankings, so it’s not one of the over 200 different signals that we use to assess the quality of a page. But I think it would be fair to think about using it as a signal. So, for example, we noticed a while ago that if you look at the page rank of a page—so how reputable we think a particular page or site is—the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable-sized tend to spell better and the sites that are lower page ranked or very low page ranked tend not to spell as well which is a pretty interesting effect if you think about it.”
John Mueller, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, provides further evidence with his video statement here:
“With regards to spelling errors, grammatical errors, I think that’s something that’s a bit more of… almost like a gray zone in that, on the one hand, we have to be able to recognize what a page is about and if we can’t recognize that because there’s so many errors on the page in the text then that makes it harder.”
What Does This Mean?
Users Don’t Like Bad Grammar
Proper spelling and grammar are less of a quantity issue and more of a quality one. This means that while Google’s algorithm won’t sanction you for having really bad writing on your website, the users who read through your content will. After all, if you can’t even properly talk about whatever it is you’re an expert on, can you be considered a credible source?
Besides the trustworthy factor, having poor spelling and grammar also affects the user experience. It may confuse your readers and turn them off from your site. If enough people see numerous typos and immediately click away (which they are wont to do), Google starts tagging your website as undesirable. Then you’ll be even less likely to show up on the rankings.
As an Orange County SEO expert, we highly recommend using Grammarly to fix any spelling and grammatical errors you may have. It offers both free and premium options and can be applied in a variety of settings—emails, documents, social media, and more! Hemingway is another useful app that can make your content easier to read.
Good Grammar Shows You Make an Effort
The world of SEO is very cutthroat with hundreds of thousands of websites competing to be the very best. Duane Forrester, Bing’s Senior Product Manager, succinctly explains why good grammar is an absolute must in this statement:
“This might all seem a bit ‘down in the weeds’, but 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.”
As we can see, proper spelling and grammar on a site is the barest minimum that should be achieved. It’s free, doesn’t take a lot of effort, and doesn’t take long to fix either. If you truly care about your brand, mastering the basics is the least you can do.
On a related note, reviews left by customers do not affect your rankings so you shouldn’t be worried about them too much. Just make sure to keep them as un-spammy as possible!