Introduction
Your company website is your online shopfront. It plays a crucial role in building and maintaining the reputation of your business. Therefore, it is important for the content of your website to be clear and engaging and to create the right impression so as not to drive potential clients away – you wouldn’t want a shopfront with dirty windows, would you?
Unlike most blog or social media posts that have a short lifespan and are often written in haste or on the spur of the moment, the content on a website – while dynamic – is intended to stay for much longer, and here are some reasons why you should consider hiring a trained proofreader to check it for you before your website goes live.
Typos and grammatical errors can affect your search rankings
One of the many things SEO takes into accounts is the number of links to and from your website. In this blog article, John Kilmerstone explains how spelling and grammatical errors can undermine your reputation and put other people off linking to your website, because they don’t want to look unprofessional by association.
Typos can have a serious negative impact on sales
Imagine you’re shopping online, and you find the same product on two websites. It is cheaper enough to be enticing on one of the websites, but the product description on that website contains typos and grammatical errors. Which of the two sites are you going to buy from?
In a BBC News article by Sean Coughlan, online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe cites an online retailer that saw its revenue per visitor double after correcting a typo on its website. He puts this down to the fact that ‘when you sell or communicate on the internet, 99% of the time it is done by the written word.’
Typos can cause irreparable damage to your reputation
This was actually found on the back cover of a catalogue for a greeting cards company:
Image credit: Bruce Oberg/Dani Johnson
It’s a prime example of a typo that can cause potential and existing clients to lose faith in your competence and professionalism and ruin your brand’s reputation.
While websites can easily be corrected, printed materials cannot. This is why you should also hire a proofreader to check things like user guides, marketing brochures, flyers, promotional banners – and slides that will be projected behind you while you give a presentation: the last thing you want is for people to be distracted from what you are saying because you are standing in front of an embarrassing typo!
A professional proofreader is trained to look for:
- typos, misspellings, grammatical errors and punctuation issues
- inconsistencies in content and layout
- departures from style or brand guidelines
- problems with numbering sequences, tables, illustrations and references
- ambiguity and opportunities to improve clarity, flow and readability
To find out more, please contact Agnès Lombard at Precision Proof, or Colin Needham at TMORPH design & print.