8 Surprising Ways Proofreading Drives Business Growth
Want to achieve sustainable business growth? Looking ahead is essential.
Emerging technologies and fresh waves of innovation constantly reshape how businesses operate and how consumers make decisions. To remain competitive, businesses must stay up-to-date with industry insights and developments – and have the agility to quickly translate them into meaningful opportunities.
An effective content marketing strategy is a major part of this. But with the unrelenting pressure to expand to new markets and scale content creation at speed, it can be easy to overlook the foundation it all depends on: quality writing.
High-quality professional writing is nonnegotiable when it comes to meeting your marketing objectives. Clear, accurate, engaging communication builds trust over time. Unclear writing peppered with errors erodes trust and damages reputations. With so much at stake, you need a reliable way to protect the clarity and credibility of your content. This is where proofreading comes in.
In this blog post, we’ll explore eight surprising ways proofreading business writing can help you stay ahead of the curve, whether you’re promoting a new product or service or nurturing existing customer relationships:
- Making a positive first impression
- Streamlining customer support
- Building brand authority
- Establishing your brand voice
- Improving accessibility and inclusivity
- Preventing expensive mistakes
- Boosting SEO and conversion rates
- Improving employee satisfaction and retention
Keep reading until the end to find out how Knowadays can help you, or your team, hit your business targets.
1. Make a Positive First Impression
In business as in life, first impressions matter.
According to one survey, 35% of people find it difficult to change a first impression once it’s been formed – making it especially important for businesses to get it right the first time.
While a typo or stray comma may seem insignificant, it can actually make a big difference in influencing customer behavior. When a potential customer visits your website for the first time, they may only view a single piece of content, such as a landing page or product description. This leaves little margin for error. If that one piece of content is hard to read or contains lazy errors, it can leave a bad taste in their mouth. It implies that you don’t value their time or custom enough to provide high-quality content.
Even if you catch and fix mistakes post-publication, it can be difficult to repair that damage and restore trust in your brand. By thoroughly proofreading all content prior to publication, you can prevent your audience from ever seeing mistakes, reading inaccurate information, or falling victim to confusing copy. This sets the standard for the quality your audience can expect from your brand, right from the first interaction.
2. Streamline Customer Support
While expanding to new markets is essential for business growth, it’s not the only part of maintaining a successful business. You also need to consider your existing readers and customer base and how to improve their experience on your website.
Proofreading customer-facing materials, such as FAQs, checkout pages, and contact instructions, is equally as important as proofreading marketing content. A survey found that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a negative experience, so it’s up to you to make every experience as smooth and positive as possible.
Clear, easy-to-follow customer support content reduces user frustration, leading to smoother user journeys, fewer support queries, and increased customer retention (an important driver of long-term growth). In turn, this frees up your team to focus on high-priority projects, instead of explaining confusing website content to customers!
3. Build Brand Authority
Every piece of writing your business publishes – such as reports, newsletters, blog posts, and even social media content – shapes how your audience views your brand and contributes to whether they choose to become your customer (or a competitor’s). Inconsistencies in tone, style, or word choice can give the appearance of disorganization or even unprofessionalism, which undermines your credibility.
Proofreading your content is one of the simplest and most effective ways to build that all-important trust consumers are looking for in a business. If your content is polished and free from errors, it immediately signals professionalism. Consumers cite credibility as one of the top reasons they choose one brand over others, with one survey showing 46% of consumers were willing to pay more for a brand name they trust.
Loyal customers are also more likely to leave a positive review or testimonial about your business. This type of social proof can make a big impact, considering many consumers today prefer to research a brand before making a purchase. Over time, this consistency has a cumulative effect, reinforcing the sense of reliability that keeps customers returning and recommending your brand.
4. Establish Your Brand Voice
Proofreading also means that your brand voice stays consistent across all platforms, both internal and external. A consistent voice makes your content more recognizable, helping your audience identify your brand even before they see your logo.
If you don’t have one already, consider creating a style guide and making it available to your entire team, as well as any consultants or freelancers brought in on projects. Establishing a detailed style guide helps your business develop clear, consistent branding and makes sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to style, tone, and voice. It also prevents inconsistencies with common issues such as punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and terminology. This is especially true as a small business grows and more people contribute to each piece of writing.
5. Improve Accessibility and Inclusivity
Well-edited content that’s easy to scan and digest broadens your reach by making your message accessible to a wider range of readers.
Accessibility and inclusivity play a central role in the customer journey, with many consumers expecting brands to provide content that accommodates different needs. Taking the time to ensure your message is understood and remembered by all readers – regardless of their accessibility requirements or familiarity with your industry – makes your business more competitive by reducing friction and enabling more people to engage with your content.
Proofreading supports accessibility in several practical ways, such as:
- Enhancing clarity and concision (e.g., by correcting run-on sentences)
- Structuring content in a reader-friendly way (e.g., with clear headings and subheadings, varied sentence structure, and short paragraphs)
- Improving readability by using proper punctuation and correct vocabulary
- Eliminating or rewording confusing phrases or terminology (e.g., by using plain English)
By removing barriers for readers, including those with cognitive, visual, or language-processing challenges, you make it easier for more people to engage with your business. This reduces a website’s drop-off rate and increases the likelihood readers will become customers.
6. Prevent Expensive Mistakes
If you run a business, then you know the importance of sticking to a budget – and making sure every penny goes to where it’ll make the biggest impact. At first glance, it might appear as though skipping proofreading and going straight to publication is streamlining your workflow and trimming costs. However, missing this one step can actually cost you far more in the long run.
When you have to pull live content from your website to correct errors or inconsistencies, it causes confusion and wastes valuable time and resources. In many cases, the disruption ends up being far more costly and time-consuming than simply proofreading up front.
Errors can also have surprising legal consequences for businesses. One well-known example occurred in 2006, when a missing serial comma in a Maine law listing overtime exemptions created enough ambiguity to win a dairy company’s delivery drivers a multimillion-dollar settlement.
Daily business operations have changed dramatically in recent years, with 78% of organizations reporting using AI in some form in 2024. While AI has its benefits and is capable of producing a large amount of content quickly (and inexpensively), the output should be humanized and thoroughly proofread for best results. Furthermore, AI can sometimes hallucinate statistics or facts, and these inaccuracies are much easier (and less embarrassing!) to catch during the proofreading process. Essentially, while AI writing tools can help you scale content creation, they should never replace careful human review – especially when your reputation is at stake.
Think of proofreading business writing as quality control – a necessary step that ensures potentially embarrassing mistakes don’t get noticed by customers.
7. Boost SEO and Conversion Rates
Boosting your ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) or appearing in AI Overviews is a proven way to increase visitors to your website, with the top three results receiving the majority of clicks overall. To achieve a coveted top spot, web page content undergoes search engine optimization (SEO) to help prove its appeal to the digital tools that rank websites in SERPs.
Since 2023, Google’s helpful content updates have prioritized high-quality, “user-first” websites over generic, vague, or generally unhelpful content. This shift was designed to improve user experience and better match content to search intent, and it added an extra factor to SEO activities.
Proofreading contributes to SEO-friendly content in several ways, for example:
- Making sure text is scannable for skim readers
- Eliminating duplicate or redundant content
- Removing overly complex wording and unnecessary jargon
- Ensuring keywords and phrases are incorporated naturally (and reducing any keyword stuffing)
- Correcting distracting and unprofessional typos and other errors
Proofreading to improve SEO is especially significant if your business uses AI-generated writing in any form. While the update from Google doesn’t specifically target AI content for lower rankings, it does reward well-written, “people-first” content that offers value to users. Proofreading humanizes AI content, making it more natural and less formulaic, which in turn leads to more user engagement and indicates value to search engines.
8. Improve Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Business growth isn’t just about marketing and expanding into new audience sectors. It also heavily relies on internal team productivity and retention.
When employees know what to expect and have easy access to essential information, such as project guidelines or role descriptions, it improves job satisfaction and reinforces a positive work environment. One report found that 55% of workers spend between 30 and 120 minutes a day seeking clarification on job-related details – the result of ineffective or unclear internal communication. Not only does this decrease productivity, but it also lowers team morale.
One way to prevent this is by implementing proofreading across all internal communications. Proofreading emails, memos, announcements, and training materials minimizes misunderstandings among team members, which allows them to better collaborate and focus on their tasks. In addition, well-written directives demonstrate strong leadership, boosting confidence in the company, which in turn aids employee retention. Essentially, when a team can communicate effectively, it strengthens consistent, sustainable business growth and keeps everyday operations running smoothly.
Proofreading For Professionals
If you’re looking for an effective way to upskill yourself or your team and boost your business growth, check out our comprehensive Proofreading For Professionals course. It teaches everything you need to know about improving the quality and readability of written content so you can achieve your business goals.
Want to learn more about what proofreading can do for your business? Try two free lessons with no strings attached to find out more.
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