Think a few typos or mistakes on your website won’t matter to your visitors? Well, think again.

The BBC recently reported that “poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for internet businesses.”

That news story attracted a whopping 622 comments from impassioned web users who agree they click off lickety-split from websites that contain mistakes.

Loss of business, damaged credibility, lack of trust and even scamming were just some of the typical comments associated with error-ridden business websites.

One web user wrote:

I am grateful that legitimate web sites and e-mail senders tend to pay good attention to proper spelling and grammar, while phishers and scammers tend not to. It amounts to a useful first-look criterion for distinguishing between them. An error, especially a plainly careless or prominent one, makes me suspicious.

Could your website be inadvertently ruining your reputation because of errors… causing prospective customers to suspect you might even be a phisher or scammer?

Most small businesses don’t have the need (or budget) to retain a full-time writer. And few employees are unlikely to have expert literary skills. So businesses tend to rely on spellchecking tools.

The problem is, as many have discovered to their cost, spell-check won’t catch confused homonyms or incorrect contractions – the very mistakes that consumers view as the absolute worst culprits:

1. Their vs. There vs. They’re
2. It’s vs. Its
3. Than vs. Then
4. Effect vs. Affect
5. You’re vs. Your

While most web users agree that it’s one things to happen across spelling violations on, say, Facebook – it’s another matter altogether if found on the home page of a business website. Commit any of the above “5 Deadly Spelling Sins”, and you can bet it’s “virtual” business suicide.

Consumers aren’t the only ones turned-off by bad spelling. Google executive Matt Cutts has gone on record saying that the internet’s top search engine penalizes websites because of bad spelling and grammar:

We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page – how reputable we think a particular page or site is – the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.

So how can small businesses improve their written communication (and protect their reputation and Page Rank)?

Hiring a freelance website proofreader is a clear, budget-friendly solution. A professional proofreader will correct typos, misspellings, grammar, tense and sentence structure. You

Internet entrepreneur Charles Duncombe believes that even a single mistake on a website could cut online sales in half. Let’s just repeat that. A single mistake can cut online sales in half.

As a small business owner, can you afford to make such a potentially costly mistake?