According to an article making the rounds last week from the good ol’ beeb: Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales:
He says he measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
“If you project this across the whole of internet retail, then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes,” says Mr Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group.
Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.
While it may be hard to measure the ROI of good editing strictly in terms of the credibility of your brand, this is one concrete example of how that can trickle down.
The Gray Lady follows up with more on the Price of Typos:
While the idea that sloppy spelling can sink whole businesses seems far-fetched, even casual bloggers recognize the imperative to spell well online. This is because search engines look for strings of characters in sequence, and if your site has misspellings, Google is less likely to list it at the top of search results.
Of course, at STS the price of typos is a trip to the principal’s office if I find too many in my review of our writers’ drafts.
We use iterative review processes and ensure there are multiple pairs of eyes on a document before it ships. We know that we’re human and humans are fallible, so we put in the time and effort to get things right.