Grammar Mistakes Harm Your Small Business

A few weeks ago a letter arrived in the mail from a local mortgage company. I opened it and immediately took notice of something in the company letterhead:

"Proud to be apart of the community!"

And while working recently with a soon-to-open Italian restaurant, I noticed the word "spaghetti" was misspelled as "spaggetti" on the menus.

Of course, these are benign errors, and it's unfair to judge a person's skills, abilities and proficiency with pasta based on a spelling or grammar mistake. But from a business perspective, future customers and clients are always judging in order to determine where to spend their money, devote their time and invest their energy.

The success of a small business is dependent on making great first, second and then lasting impressions, and when starting or maintaining a business, you cannot afford to let mistakes of this nature represent your company and hard work.

How detrimental are typos or grammar mistakes to the success of a small business? A study by Website Planet found that when comparing two identical websites — one with typos, one without — the website with typos had an 85% higher bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave after looking at only one page) than the clean site. On top of that, the customers not only left more frequently, they left faster, too.

The same goes for printed business copy like brochures, pamphlets, menus and advertising. A restaurant is free to boast about its incredible spaggetti, but in an area teeming with Italian eateries, the one that cannot spell its featured dish will struggle to serve it.

Benign spelling or grammar mistakes like these erode the credibility of your business in the eyes of customers and drive them away to your competitors. To potential customers, a small business might not be an authority on a particular part of the marketplace if it fails to competently express it in writing.

In the case of the mortgage company, it's easy to understand the intended meaning of that exclamation. Nobody really believes the mortgage brokers are glad to be apart from their local clients. Maybe they were genuinely excited about their service to the community and couldn't wait to tell everyone about it on their letterhead. (Remember, spell check is not a proofreader!)

But will a prospective client be so forgiving? Probably not. After all, if they are sloppy with stationery, what happens when they are entrusted with handling dollar amounts, bank rates and loan documentation? Simple mistakes there can cause delays and cost real money.

It gets worse, too. Regarding errors on websites, when bounce rates go up (due to mistakes that turn away customers), your ranking on search engines goes down. So with every apart or spaggetti, you lose the customers that visited your site and prevent more from ever getting there at all.

Launching and maintaining a small business is hard work, and it's easy to overlook the importance of clean writing. But it is absolutely vital that this part of your business is handled with care.

PJC Editing & Proofreading provides services and packages designed for small businesses, and offers a free introductory review. See more on our Small Business pricing page.