A website only gets a few seconds to make that all-important first impression on potential clients. In that time, they are going to skim and scan the site's content for the information they need before they decide to delve further into what a company has to offer. If potential clients are met with content that's riddled with grammatical errors and typos, they will be turned off by the site entirely, only to be turned on to someone else's – likely, one of that site's competitors.
Don't believe me?
BBC wrote about this very topic in 2011. In that article, UK businessman Charles Duncombe cited data conducted by his research to measure the effect spelling errors in website content has on online sales.
He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
"If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," says Mr Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group. SOURCE: BBC
Some may argue that typos are an unavoidable byproduct of human error. True – people do make mistakes. However, precautions can be taken to avoid those mistakes and efforts can be made to rectify those mistakes, should they happen. Unfortunately, many business owners fail do to either and end up suffering a loss of revenue because of it.
So when was the last time you looked at your website's content?
I mean really looked at it.
If you can't remember, then it's probably been too long.
So go ahead and do that now.
We'll wait.
Potential clients, however, may not.