When it comes to your website’s ranking on SERPs, the quality of your content matters. And no matter how well-written and targeted your content is, glaring grammatical errors and typos look unprofessional and decrease your business’s brand authority.
Proofreading your content can significantly boost your ranking on SERPs and ensure your content stands out in a competitive e-commerce marketplace. In this post, we’ll take you through why proofreading really matters for search engine optimization (SEO), including how it can:
- Increase your credibility
- Improve user experienace
- Better implement keywords and phrases
- Boost the content quality
- Optimize content for mobile devices
- Enhance the potential for backlinks
- Reduce duplicate or redundant content
Keep reading to learn more about why proofreading really matters for SEO.
What Is Proofreading for Business Content?
In the marketing world, quality is more important than quantity. Proofreading business content is an essential part of the editorial process because it improves content quality – and it shouldn’t be bypassed or rushed in favor of producing more content faster.
Proofreading is the final editorial step prior to publication – after drafting and editing have been completed – and involves reviewing the content for surface-level issues like grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, typos, and style guide inconsistencies. Essentially, proofreading ties your content together and demonstrates your business’s commitment to quality and attention to detail.
When reviewing content, create a proofreading checklist and look for common issues such as:
- Typos and misspellings
- Inconsistencies
- Capitalization errors
- Grammatical mistakes (e.g., incorrect subject-verb agreement or tense issues)
- Punctuation errors (e.g., comma splices, missing end punctuation, misused colons/semicolons)
- Run-on or incomplete sentences
- Unclear phrasing
- Misplaced modifiers
In addition to these issues, check for adherence to your company’s style guide to ensure consistency across all communication platforms. If you don’t have a style guide, consider collaborating with your team to develop one; detailed style guides streamline the proofreading process and ensure everyone is on the same page when it comes to editorial decisions.
Why Proofreading Matters for SEO
You know proofreading is an important part of establishing trustworthiness and impacts how your audience perceives your brand – but why does it matter for SEO? In 2022, Google released its Helpful Content Update, which aimed to prioritize and boost the ranking of websites that provide helpful, informative, and high-quality content. In contrast, those with low-quality or irrelevant content would be penalized with lower rankings on SERPs. Essentially, this should result in a larger audience for websites that produce unique and well-written (and thoroughly proofread) content that directly answers user search queries.
Another goal of the Helpful Content Update was for users to be better able to access factually accurate, verifiable websites. Proofreading your content helps ensure the information you publish is meeting your standards for accuracy, and it gives you an opportunity to correct any errors or misleading information prior to publication.
Next, let’s review some of the specific ways that proofreading can impact SEO and benefit your business.
1. Increase Your Credibility
Content that’s riddled with errors negatively impacts the trust and credibility you are trying to build with your audience. Even if a first-rate marketing strategy and well-structured website attracts visitors to your site, poorly written content will quickly cause them to doubt your claims.
When users fully trust your content and brand, they are more likely to stay on your site longer, view multiple pages, and return in the future. Search engines recognize user engagement metrics like these as indicators of quality content and may reward your site with higher rankings.
2. Improve User Experience
Well-written content that’s free of distracting errors is more engaging and contributes to a positive overall user experience. When website visitors can easily access and comprehend your content, they’re more likely to explore the products and services you’re offering and respond to your calls to action. Content with many visible errors can detract from the user experience and increase bounce rates, which can negatively impact your SEO rankings.
3. Better Implement Keywords and Phrases
Keywords, when used correctly, are a significant part of content marketing and SEO. Proofreading ensures that your keywords and phrases are used effectively throughout your content (i.e., they read naturally and don’t feel forced into the copy). Proper keyword usage improves the relevance of your content to search queries, increasing the likelihood of ranking highly for those search terms.
4. Boost the Content Quality
Proofreaders can also flag potential gaps and fact-check your content, as well as making general recommendations for how you can improve the writing. This improves the quality of the content, which can result in a higher Google ranking. Prioritizing content quality also has other benefits besides SEO, such as increasing the likelihood that your content will be liked or shared on social media.
Investing in proofreading is especially important if you use AI-generated content for your website. AI writing tools are capable of producing a high volume of content quickly, but that content typically lacks originality, and it won’t reflect your chosen brand voice or personality. While Google doesn’t penalize AI-generated content specifically, it does prioritize factually accurate content that offers a unique perspective on a topic, something that can be difficult (or even impossible) to achieve using AI alone. Combining AI content with proofreading provides that extra human touch and builds a solid connection with your audience, resulting in improved SEO.
5. Optimize Content for Mobile Devices
With mobile searches on the rise, it’s essential that your content is scannable and optimized for mobile devices. Well-proofread content is easier for readers to quickly skim, and it also makes it easier for users to navigate content on a small screen. This can increase the number of visitors to your website and potentially boost your mobile search rankings.
6. Enhance the Potential for Backlinks
High-quality content is more likely to be shared by and linked to from other websites (also known as backlinking). Backlinks from authoritative sites are a significant factor in determining SEO rankings because they signal to the search engine that your content is valuable and your website is worth visiting.
7. Reduce Duplicate or Redundant Content
Proofreading helps minimize repetitive and redundant content, which can be distracting to readers and dilute your message. Duplicate content can damage the overall readability and usefulness of your content, which can impact your brand authority and potentially lead to lower rankings.
Proofed for Business
In a competitive e-commerce marketplace, SEO is key to your business’s success – and when it’s your content that drives SEO, it’s essential to prioritize quality over quantity. Don’t leave anything to chance; ensure your brand stands out from the competition by having it professionally proofread by our expert team. Schedule a call today to learn more about how professional proofreading can boost your ranking on search engine results pages.
