Introduction
Your website’s content is a cornerstone of your business, and when it’s of subpar quality, it actively harms your organisation’s credibility and bottom line.
Through analysis of common industry patterns, I’ve identified the most frequent content issues that sabotage business websites – from unclear messaging to poor editorial organisation.
By applying straightforward techniques that are routinely used in professional publishing – techniques that are accessible and easy to understand – you can effectively fix these issues and enhance your website’s effectiveness.
Avoid poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors
Unsurprisingly, as in any other endeavour in business management, sloppy, ill thought-out presentation of written material will not impress most literate readers.
But on the web, when your content must compete with every rival in your sector, poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors on a website signal carelessness and unprofessionalism, eroding customer trust and undermining the business’s credibility and perceived competence.
Never underestimate the value of proofreading to web quality
Fundamentally connected to the last point, of course, put your most fastidious proofreader to work and develop a routine to ensure every word freshly created by your team gets read by at least one extra set of eyes, the fussier and more strongly qualified, the better.
Eliminate inconsistent tone of voice across pages and between contributors
Creating a disjointed brand experience for visitors, an inconsistent tone of voice across your website’s pages and the work of its contributors undermines a business’s believability by confusing visitors, communicating unreliability, and breaking trust, which weakens brand recognition and customer loyalty.
Reinforcing the negative impression conveyed by poor spelling and grammar, this inconsistency too makes a business appear unprofessional and fragmented, causing users to question its expertise and authenticity, ultimately reducing conversions and damaging reputation.
Maintaining a unified tone builds clarity, trust, and a strong, recognisable brand identity essential for authority and customer confidence
Make your calls to action (CTAs) clear
A lack of clear CTAs frustrates users, making them unsure what to do next. This confusion conveys disorganisation and indifference, potentially severely undermining the business’s professionalism and trustworthiness. Unsurprisingly, this then reduces visitor engagement and conversion rates.
Never leave outdated or inaccurate information unchecked
It should hardly be surprising that the presence on your site of outdated or inaccurate information signals neglect and incompetence, making potential customers question your business’s reliability, professionalism, and ability to deliver current, trustworthy services.
Consistently check for content duplication across pages or sections
As bad as dated or inaccurate information, when left unchecked, content duplication also makes a business appear lazy, unprofessional, and even potentially deceptive to customers while harming search engine rankings and user experience.
Never overuse jargon, buzzwords, acronyms or internal terminology
By making content incomprehensible or inaccessible to your target audience, overuse of jargon and buzzwords can alienate customers, creating confusion. If such terminology is not explained at the earliest opportunity, by suggesting a lack of understanding of your audience’s needs, it can undermine your business’s authenticity – and competitiveness.
Protect against a lack of SEO optimisation in written content
A lack of attention to on-page SEO optimisation in website content undermines effective business communication by signalling low authority to search engines, reducing search visibility and causing poor user experience, even leading to lost trust and traffic. Without consideration being paid to SEO, content can appear irrelevant or unprofessional, even damaging brand reputation to risk driving potential customers away.
Remove inconsistent formatting, headings, and page structure
If found on your site, creating a poor user experience and navigation problems, inconsistent formatting, headings, and page structure communicate carelessness and lack of professionalism on the part of the publisher, reinforcing visitors’ questioning of your business’s attention to detail, reliability, and overall sense-making.
Never plan late to align your content with your business's goals
Failing to align your website’s copy with your business’s aims undermines perceptions of integrity because it creates inconsistent, confusing messages that erode trust, reduce engagement, and damage your brand’s professional image. Without a clear single message, visitors can doubt your organisation’s reliability and may leave, leading to lost opportunities and weakened reputation over time.
Always tailor your content to your target audience
As if it was not hard enough in the first place to attract visitors to your site, if those coming represent your target audience, driving them away by providing content not written to meet their interests suggests you have a poor understanding of their needs. By reducing reader engagement and trust, you damage your business’s standing.
In any medium featuring content created by publishing professionals, failure to engage and to resonate with intended readers is the cardinal sin most needing to be avoided.
Replace missing or thin content on key service or product pages
Sparse or limited content on key service or product pages undermines a customer’s decision-making ability when it provides insufficient buying information. By showing a lack of expertise, professionalism, and care, it can also sabotage a business’s legitimacy when it causes visitors to doubt the brand’s reliability and integrity. Content of subpar quality also leads to poor user experience, higher bounce rates, and lower search engine rankings, further damaging reputation and reducing customer engagement and conversions.
Optimise text for web readability
Proving yourselves unable to communicate through web-readable text can create easily avoided barriers to content consumption, frustrating users, leading to poor engagement and elevated bounce rates. Ultimately, this naturally undermines any business’s perceived professionalism.
Use a style guide to enforce consistent editorial standards
Failure to adopt a uniform style guide or editorial standards leads to inconsistent, error-prone content. When the words used are of dubious quality, this can definitely make your business appear unprofessional and unreliable, thus eroding the trust of potential converts.
Avoid slow content production resulting from unclear roles
Slow content production resulting from unclear internal authorial and editorial content-creation responsibilities can delay the arrival of important updates and new content on your site.
Further, it can unwittingly express internal disorganisation, reducing trust in the business’s ability to deliver timely, coordinated, and professional information to its audience.
Enforce a structured editorial workflow and review process
Resulting in unreviewed, potentially problematic content even going, or worse, staying, “live” before it is identified and taken down, a lack of structured editorial workflow or review process leads to inconsistent, error-prone site content, signalling disorganisation and carelessness, which can, again, undermine trust in your business’s ability to do what it promises.
Fix broken or poorly written internal/external links
Broken or poorly written links warn of neglect, frustrating users and eroding trust, making your business appear unprofessional and unreliable, damaging user experience and SEO performance.
Never over-focus on design at the cost of content quality
Prioritising aesthetics over substance, to place excessive emphasis on design, can distract from essential content, leading to perceptions of superficiality. This undermines visitor appeal, as customers typically prioritise informative content they can use over that which simply looks good.
Avoid posting images without captions, context, or alt text
Images lacking captions, context, or alt text reduce accessibility and SEO value, appearing unprofessional, potentially excluding disabled users, hurting SEO rankings, and suggesting poor attention to detail and accessibility standards.
Conclusion: Strong content starts when you decide to make smarter editorial decisions
Your written expression on the web deserves at least the same level of professionalism in its delivery as your products or services.
Don’t let weak writing cost you another customer.
Trust is built sentence by sentence. Let’s rebuild yours – starting now.
Graham Lauren
graham@machinereadablelabs.com
0416 171724
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