When people talk about SEO (search engine optimisation), the focus usually lands on keywords, backlinks and page speed.
Spelling and grammar rarely get the same attention, yet they play a bigger role in SEO performance than many businesses realise.
Strictly speaking, spelling and grammar are not direct ranking factors – Google has confirmed this publicly. However, that does not mean they are irrelevant. Poor spelling and grammar have the potential to undermine user experience, trust and clarity, which directly influences how your content performs in search.
What does Google actually say?
Google Search Advocate John Mueller has explained that spelling errors fall into a grey area. If Google struggles to understand what a page is about because the writing is unclear or riddled with errors, it becomes harder to rank that page accurately. More importantly, users are far less forgiving.
From a user perspective, bad spelling signals low quality. If someone lands on a financial, legal or medical website, for example, and the writing feels careless, trust can instantly drop. When users lose trust, they leave, and higher bounce rates and lower engagement send negative signals back to Google.
The same logic applies to grammar. Google does not run a grammar checker to rank pages, but it does measure how users interact with content. If text is hard to follow, poorly structured or confusing, users can disengage.
This link between readability and credibility is well documented. Research highlighted by the Harvard Business Review found that most professionals consider poorly written content a waste of time. Content that is unclear, bloated (full of filler or stuffed with keywords) or badly written is often dismissed outright, regardless of how valuable the information might be.
Clear writing makes your content easier to scan, understand and trust. Those factors directly support stronger SEO performance.
How to keep your content high quality
It can help to read your copy out loud, have someone else review it and use tools like Grammarly as a safety net (not as a replacement for human judgement though). Better still, you can work with professionals who write for both search engines and people.
If you want blogs that build trust, keep users engaged and support long term SEO growth, have your content written by a team of professionals like us at Engage Web. We focus on credibility and performance, so your content works as hard as your website does, helping your business in fast-developing areas like AI Overview SEO.
- Are industry pages beneficial for SEO? - January 9, 2026
- Does spelling and grammar impact SEO? - January 8, 2026
- How to win visibility in an AI-first search world - January 6, 2026
