Spelling and grammar errors are a fact of life, no matter how careful you or your team are, they are going to happen.

Spelling and grammar errors cost your business customers, hurt your brand, damage your ranking in search engines and surprisingly they can also cost you extra on your advertising. In 2019, Website Planet did an A/B Split Test comparing pages with typos in grammar and spelling and learned some interesting information.

In one test, typos on a landing page increased bounce rate by 85% and reduced time on site by 8%. They also learned bad grammar impacted Google Ads significantly, reducing traffic by 4% and cost 70% more per visitor due to lower ad quality score.

How poor grammar and spelling errors impact search ranking is likely indirect, while Google doesn't come right out and say they rank pages with spelling errors lower, we can assume a higher bounce rate and lower time on page will likely signal a lower page quality score in some fashion. Bing on the other hand, specifically says their engine pays attention to spelling and grammar.

Fixing the problem...

In an ideal world, we would spell check, grammar check and peer review every URL as we add it to the website, but we all know that's not going to happen in many cases. As part of a site audit, the entire site should be checked, however we've never really discussed what tools we use to do it. So, here they are.

1. Screaming Frog