Chris Glithero
If you were running a high street store and you gave out inaccurate or misleading information on a regular basis, how long do you think your business would last? Why should the internet be any different?
All too many businesses have a somewhat blasé approach to ensuring the integrity of their website content and the content that they share elsewhere on the web. Inaccuracy is rife across the web in a number of forms:
- Factual inaccuracies – This might concern untruths willfully or accidentally reported as fact, or it might simply be facts and statistics which are inaccurate to some degree.
- Spelling mistakes – A single spelling mistake can affect the way that potential customers see your website. More than a couple will soon send them reaching for the back button.
- Typos – They may well be accidental, but the presence of typos in your finished copy illustrates a lack of care in and commitment to your content.
- Grammar and punctuation mistakes – Errors of this kind can be jarring and distract the reader from what they are actually reading. They can occur if the person creating your content isn’t a trained copywriter, or if you outsource your content production to a web copywriter for whom English is not a first language.
Take a look at your website. If you can spot several of these types of errors after looking for a few moments then it might be time to reconsider your content production strategy.
If you sell a service or products online, accuracy is of the utmost importance. Picture the situation – a person is browsing your website looking for X. While looking for X, they come across a number of obvious errors, and thus conclude that your website is unprofessional or worse, ‘shady’. While they’re aware that this might not be the case, there’s plenty of choice out there on the internet and they’d rather not take the risk, so they hit the back button on their browser and look for another site to fulfil their needs.
In this hypothetical instance, you lost the chance to make a sale before the customer even found the product they were looking for. By taking the time to ensure that your content is not only error-free but exceptionally well written, you can therefore substantially increase the chances of making a sale every time someone lands on your site.
Usher in an era without errors
So what can you do to ensure that all of your online content is error-free?
- Read each piece of content through thoroughly and then read it again
- Cross-check any facts or statistics that you quote on your site
- Hire a professional UK copywriter or a copywriting agency to create content on your behalf
The latter is not only an effective way of eliminating errors and improving the quality of your content, it will also give you more time to concentrate on other important aspects of your business.
Are you certain that your website is error-free? What are your perceptions when you come across an error online? Let us know in the comments section.
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