One of the biggest problems that many websites face today is a decline in the quality of the written content on the page. In particular, many websites contain grammar errors that range from distracting to downright embarrassing. While it might not seem like a big deal to use “to” when you mean “too” or to put an apostrophe in every plural word, these errors can really affect how your visitors interact with your site. Therefore, it is essential to make sure that your page content is free from grammatical errors.
When your website content contains grammatical errors, there are many potential problems. Bad grammar tells your customer that your website lacks authority and credibility. If you can’t correctly convey information about your product or business, then your customers are likely going to go elsewhere for their needs. Similarly, a grammatical error might cause confusion in your visitors. Instead of buying your product, they will be scratching their heads and leaving your page with an empty cart. If your grammatical mistakes are egregious enough, your website might just end up going viral as a gag. Unfortunately, this won’t be a case of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
In addition to causing you to lose customers, your bad grammar might make it so that your customers never even find you. The search engines often punish sites with poor content and grammatical mistakes. If your site ends up ranking poorly in the search engines because of your sloppy content, then you will find your business tanking faster than you can find and correct your grammar mistakes.
There are many reasons why grammar mistakes have become so prevalent on the internet today. Part of it is lack of attention to detail. Many people don’t bother to proofread their work closely. Others aren’t familiar enough with the rules and don’t seek out extra help. There are also many websites that end up with bad content because they got what they paid for. While it’s important to avoid spun content and buying cheap articles, you don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune to get quality content that is error free. Fortunately, there are many great tools out there to help you catch those grammar mistakes before they show up on your website and on someone’s Twitter feed.
Use These Free Grammar Check Tools
While Grammarly isn’t a completely free tool, it is one of the most powerful grammar checking options available. Grammarly instantly checks your content for over 250 types of grammatical mistakes, including common word usage errors that are detected by an adaptive spell checker. The site offers vocabulary suggestions to help optimize your content, and it also checks your content for plagiarism by cross-referencing with over 8 million web pages. This web-based program requires a subscription to get the full features, but it also offers a quick sample check on the home page. You can also get a free 7-day subscription to the site. This can really come in handy right before you are about to launch your website. You can check all of your content for mistakes and get it live before your free trial expires.
PaperRater
Like Grammarly, PaperRater provides instant online grammar check, proofreading, and plagiarism detection. Unlike Grammarly, this tool is completely free. The site doesn’t require a user to create an account or log in to use the features. Created and maintained by linguistic professors, this tool claims to catch grammatical mistakes with up to 50% more accuracy than paid services. PaperRater also provides readability statistics, style and word choice analysis, and an auto grader. When you submit a paper for evaluation, you can even input the type of paper you are writing and your education level. This gives a more accurate evaluation of the quality of the content. You can submit as much content as you want and get instant results without ever paying a dime.
Online Text Correction
This is a no-frills website that provides a quick check for grammar and spelling issues. Unlike some of the more “powerful” resources, Online Text Correction doesn’t analyze your writing style or offer more sophisticated synonyms. It simply scans your text and tells you if there are any perceived mistakes in your grammar and spelling. To use it, you enter your text and submit. Within seconds, your text will be marked up with red and green to indicate potential errors and suggestions for improvement. There are no subscriptions and no bonus features here. This is a simple tool that gets the job done quickly if you just want to double check your text before publishing it. Unfortunately, this tool seems to have some bugs when trying to process large chunks of text, and it’s also distracting that there was an ad for Grammarly during our entire visit to the site.
No matter what tool you decide to use to check over your web content, it’s essential that you read it over several times before publishing. If you don’t, you may end up as somebody’s social media joke of the day. Even worse, you’ll end up without any customers.
