Does Your Business Even Need Good Content?
It’s a fair question. Obviously, for industries directly related to writing, the answer is yes. But what if you sell power tools or financial services or website design?
Does it really matter if what people read on your website is perfect English, as long as they can understand enough to buy the right product? Why would you shell out money for this “extra” service?
I’d argue that yes, good content is important whatever service or product you’re selling. Here’s why.
1. Most people recognize “bad” English
If you were raised in an English-speaking household, you have been consuming quality writing for decades. Sure, there’s a lot of bad writing out there, but the vast majority of what’s reaching your eyeballs is well-written, simply because grammar has long been considered an important step on the road to publication.
Even if you bombed every Grammar quiz and vowed never to think about serial commas again after English 100, you have been inundated with proper grammar and syntax for as long as you’ve been reading. The simple sentences you sounded out when you were five and the great American novel (or the Cliff Notes version) you read in university, the magazine you flip through on the plane, and the latest inspiring memoir you grabbed off the bookstore shelf—these have all been reviewed by someone trained to correct language-related errors.
This means it doesn’t matter if you don’t know your preposition from your adjective from your uvula—chances are, bad grammar sounds wrong to you.
2. Bad grammar feels untrustworthy
Because we’ve been raised to see correctly constructed sentences as a sign of worth (worthy to be published, to buy, to be displayed on a bookshelf or recommended to a friend), when we stumble onto a website where the content is riddled with errors, we tend to immediately assume that the product or service is low quality, too.
This isn’t necessarily true, of course. There are a dozen reasons why web content might not be grammatically sound. English might not be their first language, or their website may be translated by Google, they might not be able to afford an editor, or they might be trying to get all their products up and some sales landed before they start fine-tuning their website.
This can even become a vicious cycle if poor (or too little) content is affecting search engine results, which is affecting sales, which is affecting the ability to improve the content.
Unfortunately, a lack of correlation between bad grammar and bad product isn’t going to stop customers from making snap judgments and bouncing off your site before they see enough to validate your offering.
3. It gives customer complaints a leg to stand on
There are people who won’t give your website time to prove itself, and then there are those who will give it altogether too much time.
If your web content is unclear or inaccurate, you could end up with a slew of angry emails from customers demanding their money back because a product wasn’t “as advertised.” Even if the vital pieces of your site—the terms and conditions, say—are taken from a reliable source, there are people who will find ways to exploit the grammatical shortcomings of your product descriptions, your return policy, or the fine points of your service provisions.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether your content was inadvertently misleading or a customer is just being pedantic; as anyone who’s ever worked in sales knows, the customer is always right.
Have I convinced you that, yes, sprucing up your content will benefit your business? Cool! Drop me a line, and we’ll figure out how to make the words on your page really work for you.
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