Do you take pride in the name your parents gave you? Do you twitch a little when people get it wrong, even after you have explained how to spell it? I know I do.
Companies are the same. They care about the proper spelling of brand names as much as we care about our family names.
But in the content marketing world of blogs and social media, where writing rules are relaxed, it’s natural to ask why spelling is important.
One answer is that bad spelling impacts how potential customers view your company. In a 2022 Tidio study, more than 97% of people said grammar mistakes influence their impression of a business. And more than half said these errors make a brand seem unprofessional.
Read on to learn how spelling mistakes hurt your business and how you can stop them from happening.
Why Is Spelling Important for Your Business?
Effective landing pages have relevant keywords, responsive website design, and powerful calls to action (CTAs). Spelling mistakes negate all that.
A 2019 study by Website Planet showed the bounce rate on landing pages with grammar and punctuation mistakes was 85% higher than on error-free pages.
Readers can’t act on your CTA if they don’t stay on the page.
Spelling Mistakes Hurt Your Reputation
Another reason why spelling is important in writing is the trust it generates in your readers. Scammers deliberately use bad spelling in their emails and phishing websites, and security experts routinely remind us to look for those red flags.
If you misspell brand and product names, your readers see those red flags and stop trusting you, leading to a credibility loss that hurts your bottom line.
Robert Cialdini noted in his book Influence: The Pyschology of Persuasion that people tend to buy from those they know, like, and trust. Once you lose a customer’s trust, it’s hard to regain it.
Besides that, you may go viral for the wrong reasons. The quality of your products or services should be the talking point on social media — not spelling errors like the infamous “genious” H&M T-shirt.
Errors Lead to Rework and Lost Money
Creating copy for your blogs and landing pages is money well spent, whether you hire freelancers or agencies or do the work in-house. But paying to fix spelling mistakes is not a good use of your marketing budget or resources.
Spelling Mistakes Hurt Your User Experience
Another reason spelling is important in writing is that it impacts your website’s user experience.
If a page has spelling mistakes, visitors will find your website suspicious. In SEO terms, visitors will spend less time on your page (low dwell time) and won’t open any other page on your website (high bounce rate).
Google’s John Mueller has said grammatical and technical mistakes make a text appear to be lower-quality content. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines also mention that bad spelling and grammar make a page look unprofessional.
Spelling and grammar errors can put your page at a disadvantage over error-free pages since Google looks to serve high-quality search results.
In other words, include a spell check in your on-page SEO checklist.
How to Stop Brand Name Spelling Mistakes
Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People offers 30 principles for leadership and self-transformation, including this quote:
“A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”
In other words, as a content creator, you need to get the brand names right. At best, it conveys professionalism. And at worst, it gets ignored — which is still better than your client pointing out your mistakes.
Here are five rules to ensure you get the spelling right:
- Read your work aloud or read from the bottom up.
- Use style guides in online writing tools, such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid.
- Have someone else read your content.
- Go for a walk to get a fresh perspective before you edit your work.
- Proofread and edit before you publish.
Important Tip: If you see a spelling mistake after publishing, fix it. Don’t knowingly leave the page on the internet with typos.
Examples of Commonly Misspelled Brand Names
A popular approach when creating software brand names is to blend two words. For example: WordPress, HubSpot, and Mailchimp.
There’s seemingly a 50/50 chance the second word will or won’t be capitalized. For example, there’s an uppercase P in WordPress, lowercase c in Mailchimp. Due to this variety, the internet is full of examples of misspelled brand names:
Without a naming convention, it can be tricky to maintain consistent content.
The answer?
Pay attention to detail and use tools like a style guide and editing software to improve your results.
Final Thoughts: Content Marketing — Why Spelling Is Important for Brands
By spelling brand names correctly, you convey trust and encourage your readers to have confidence in you and your services.
And it’s not that complicated, either. You can create consistent content with correct spelling by:
- Paying attention to detail
- Proofreading before you publish
- Fixing errors when you see them
For more insights into how you can level up your content marketing strategy, check out my book, Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style. It’s a handy content marketing mentor you can take anywhere.
