If you are a real estate syndicator and are just starting your website, you know that writing quality content is a daunting task. Not everyone can afford a copywriter. What’s more, not every copywriter can write about such niche topics as real estate syndication. As a result, you end up writing your website copy yourself. Even as a native speaker, you will inevitably make grammar or spelling mistakes, overdo it with passive voice and adverbs that make your text hard to digest for readers. The solution? Proofreading tools. There are several of them in the market. However, you need to understand how they work before picking one. So here is a review of the best proofreader tools for real estate syndicators in 2021 that will save you time, money, and frustration while building your site.
Why is the quality of your website copy essential?
We will not talk about how spelling errors affect your professional image and make you lose your website visitors’ trust. However, let’s discuss a bit how spelling and grammar can affect SEO. You are building a website so that you can be found. Aren’t you? So here is how different search engines deal with spelling and grammar errors:
Google:
We don’t know for sure if Google’s algorithm can assess spelling and grammar. However, we are confident that its algorithms detect bad user experiences. With the new May 2021 update, Google is putting more emphasis on user experience than ever. Users will not stay on your site if your content has typos and poorly structured sentences. As a result, you will have a high bounce rate. It is a red flag that your site isn’t worthy of ranking in the top 10.
Bing
Bing prioritizes error-free well-written content.
Duane Forrester of Bing said:
“If you struggle to get past typos, why would an engine show a page of content with errors higher in the rankings when other pages of error-free content exist to serve the searcher? Like it or not, we’re judged by the quality of the results we show. So we are constantly watching the quality of the content we see.”
Grammarly
Free version
The free version is excellent if you have some experience writing copy and know how to structure your sentences to make them easy to read, avoid passive voice and extra adverbs. It detects spelling and grammar errors, missing commas, and other essential stuff to make your copy at least error-free if not perfectly styled. The free version highlights clarity, engagement, and delivery issues in yellow. You can’t see the suggestions unless you pay. It is a good indicator, however, which sentences need rewriting and polishing:
Paid version
The paid version of Grammarly is excellent if you are an inexperienced writer or if you want to make your writing easy to read, engaging and entertaining. Grammarly is an AI-based tool, so the more you use it – the more it learns and gives you better suggestions each time. Here is the same paragraph as above but with Grammarly Premium in action. If you are writing your website copy yourself instead of hiring a copywriter – use Grammarly Premium.
Hemingway Editor
Hemingwayapp.com is a tool to do some final edits, make sure that your text is easy to read, and eliminate unnecessary adverbs. It highlights sentences that are too long and very hard to read in red and yellow. So that you can review your writing, break sentences into shorter ones and remove adverbs where needed. This tool is 100% free. They also have a desktop app. So if you are using the free version of Grammarly, complement it with Hemingway Editor to spot issues that Grammarly might miss. From my experience, Hemingway is not necessary if you are using the premium version of Grammarly. Although, when you are writing long content, it is still a good idea to double-check it with another tool. Here is the same paragraph where I changed the structure of sentences to show you how Hemingwayapp works:
Before:
After:
Sounds better? I think that Hemingway Editor helps make your writing as bold and clear as it claims.
Prowritingaid.
Similar to Hemingway Editor, prowritingaid.com does a good job identifying hard-to-read sentences. However, it also highlights glue words – little words that hold together ‘action’ words. While action words describe what is happening and who is involved, glue words help form the sentence. Experienced copywriters know how to keep the balance between action words and glue words. The latter should not constitute more than 40-50% of your sentence. So let’s look at our paragraph edited with Prowritingaid:
Before:
After:
My tip is always to use the “Combo” checker as it checks the text based on all criteria that exist in Prowritingaid. They have a premium version too. I can’t say much about it as I used it only for a couple of months and didn’t find a lot of difference between the paid and the free versions. I’ve experienced some bugs in Prowritingaid when it didn’t spot important errors and highlighted sentences that were perfectly fine. So use your judgment and don’t let any tool decide for you.
I find Grammarly premium much more worth the buck because its user base is probably the largest among other proofreader tools. As a result, their AI learns faster.
There are more tools out there than the ones I’ve outlined in this article.
However, these three used together can replace all other proofreader tools that exist. I also recommend you run a quick check with spinmenot.io. Even if your text is 100% unique and written by you, you still need to ensure that this is how search engines will see it and aim to score below 35%. The spun content is no better than plagiarism, and it tells search engines that your copy is not unique and doesn’t add any value to the users. So why rank your website higher than the existing content on this topic? Let’s check this very article with spinmenot.io:
Here is the checklist for you to follow when writing content for your website:
- Proofread with Grammarly. Aim at 90+ score
- Proofread with Hemingway. Aim at a score below 9
- Proofread with Prowritingaid. Aim at a score below 40%
- Check with Spinmenot.io. Aim at a score below 35%
- Sleep on it
- Read your copy the next morning out loud. Do you like it?
- Ready to roll!
Do not overdo it with editing tools. You will rewrite and edit your copy many times as you go. For example, we changed the copy for the http://www.cashflowportal.com Home page 4 times.
“Perfect is the enemy of done”. Do you like your copy? Ship it!
