Does Grammar Matter in Content Marketing?

From misplaced commas to misspelled words, grammar matters in content marketing. When you publish content with grammar mistakes, you risk affecting your reputation, search engine rankings, and even conversion rates. Understand why grammar is important in content so that you can set your website up for success and drive results!

Why does grammar matter in content marketing?

Grammar matters in content marketing for a few reasons, including the following:

1. SEO rankings
2. Credibility
3. Communication
4. Trustworthiness
5. User experience
6. Brand value
7. Conversion rates

1.     SEO rankings

Search engines like Google want to deliver helpful, trustworthy content to users. When your content contains grammatical errors, whether sentence fragments or misspelled words, you affect your content’s authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This issue could affect your content’s search rankings.

That’s why it’s vital to proofread your content beforehand for grammatical errors.

2.     Credibility

Grammatical issues can also affect your company’s credibility.

Typically, people will overlook minor grammatical issues, like a single typo or an extra space. Still, when these issues are frequent or uncommon, your business looks unprofessional — regardless of your industry or target market.

This negative first impression will influence whether people continue interacting with your company.

3.     Communication

Words are the basis for communicating with users online, whether written or spoken. While some grammar errors won’t affect communication, others will force people to re-read your content or guess what you’re trying to say.

Delivering concise, to-the-point messages is critical in marketing, and grammatical errors affect that.

4.     Trustworthiness

Similar to credibility, grammatical issues in content marketing also affect your trustworthiness. Whether someone is looking for a new piece of clothing or a new kitchen appliance, they want to purchase from a place they can trust. Excessive grammar errors will erode this trust.

5.     User experience

Grammar also matters in content marketing because of how it affects the user experience.

When people read your content and scratch their heads, they’re left with two choices:

1. Re-read the content to try and understand your message
2. Leave your website to find another site to solve their problem

People vary in their choice, but you don’t want to give people a reason to leave your website. Grammatical errors, however, create a reason to leave. This scenario can hurt your company’s lead- and sales-generation efforts in the long term.

6.     Brand value

Your website’s grammatical issues can also affect your brand’s value.

From appearing sloppy to inconsiderate, grammar can create multiple impressions of your business. The worst part is these impressions can be the first impression someone has of your company, which can affect your efforts to generate revenue from digital channels.

Not to mention, typos can make your brand go viral in the worst way, hurting your business even more.

7.     Conversion rates

One of the biggest reasons grammar is important in content marketing is because your grammar will affect your conversion rates. Whether you misspell a word, generate confusing instructions, or make a fatal typo, your writing can push or pull users from becoming clients.

These grammatical errors can occur at any stage in the buying funnel, too.

For example, if someone arrives on your site through a top-of-the-funnel search and spots an off-putting grammatical error, they may exit your funnel at the start. In comparison, someone discovering your brand through a bottom-of-the-funnel search may exit your funnel upon spotting a grammar error.

Grammar errors may seem small, but they can have a big impact on user perceptions and actions. Running conversion rate optimization (CRO) audits with the help of CRO services can help identify these errors along with many other reasons why a website doesn’t convert.

7 common grammar mistakes in content marketing

Some of the most common grammar mistakes in content marketing include the following:

1. Incorrect word usage, like “effect” vs. “affect” and “then” vs. “than.”
2. Missed punctuation, like a comma, apostrophe, or period.
3. Incorrect homophones, like “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”
4. Misused apostrophes, like “its” vs. “it’s.”
5. Incomplete sentences, like a sentence fragment.
6. Incorrect subject-verb agreement, like “The team are…” vs. “The team is…”.
7. Overused punctuation, like consecutive exclamation marks.

Our best advice for avoiding these grammar mistakes includes the following:

• Get professional copywriters to produce your content
• Proofread your content aloud
• Analyze your content with copywriting tools like Grammarly

You can often find professional copywriters and copy editors working as freelancers or contractors. If you partner with a full-service digital marketing agency or content marketing company, they will likely have access to professionals in the content marketing space.

How to improve your content marketing’s grammar

There are plenty of free, accessible tools for improving your content marketing’s grammar, including:

• Grammarly
• Hemingway Editor
• Google Docs
• ChatGPT
• And more

With these tools, you can fix and fix grammar errors before you hit publish.

Improve your content marketing

Now you know how important grammar is for your SEO, but there are many other factors that can affect content’s success in the search engines.

If you want to scale up your content for SEO or other content marketing campaigns, consider the professionals behind SEO.com. WebFX is equipped with a copywriting team of 100+ experts well-versed in different industries, different content types, and more. 

Request a custom strategy and quote from our team to level up your content to improve website performance.