Before reviewing Grammarly, let’s talk about what is it? Grammarly is a technology company that helps with digital writing by detecting spelling, punctuation and grammar errors (among other things). They have a refined AI system that not only corrects spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, but can help your writing become more understandable depending on the audience. This Grammarly review will explore how useful it is in terms of a SEO perspective and whether paying the price is worth it.
Who Uses Grammarly?
Grammarly can be useful not just for SEO purposes, but for many people including both native and non-native speakers of English. Those who do not regularly write in English can especially struggle, so Grammarly may be extra helpful to them. However, other people who use Grammarly can include:
- Students
- Bloggers
- Authors
- Copywriters
- Workplace professionals drafting emails, reports, presentations, etc
- Academics to check student plagiarism
But really, it’s for anyone who wants to write and doesn’t want writing mistakes popping up to anyone else who may read it.
What Does It Do?
As previously stated, Grammarly can detect and aid in many writing issues:
- Spell Checking – their spell check tool combs through your text so you know which words you have accidentally misspelled so all mistakes can be corrected.
- Grammar and Punctuation – from basic to advanced, Grammarly detects mistakes in your grammar and punctuation, then provides suggestions on how to correct them.
- Writing Style – it can give insights to you by providing a readability score and highlights things based on sentence length (sentences of a similar length repeatedly made sound monotonous to readers).
- Plagiarism – Grammarly uses billions of web pages on the Internet to compare yours and check for plagiarism.
Pros of Grammarly
You may already know of Grammarly’s popularity among the online writing community and here’s a long list if reasons why:
- Integrates with your browser, Microsoft Word and Google Docs
- Explains your mistakes to you
- Easily accessible
- Free version available to those who do not need all of the tools
- Dictionary included
- Guides your tone and formality in writing
- Checks for inconsistencies in your writing style
- Calculates work usage
- Attention to sentence structure
- Checks for plagiarism
- Vocabulary support
- Automatically saves your work
- Document encryption included
Cons of Grammarly
Nothing is perfect, Grammarly may have plenty of advantages, but there are still some flaws:
- More expensive than other grammar checkers
- Can lag when editing large pieces of text
- No offline editing option
- Does not always work perfectly
- Cannot replace a human editor
- Adaption to the tools can take a long time
- Only works on the English language
- No translation options like other grammar checkers
The Goals Feature
With the paid version, you are able to set writing goals which include audience, formality, domain, tone and intent. Let’s dive into what these categories mean and why they are important.
- Audience – you are able to choose from general, knowledgeable or expert. Grammarly can determine the delivery of your content based on this selection. For example, there is jargon and technical terms in certain fields which experts will understand, but the general audience probably wouldn’t.
- Formality – this can be informal, neutral or formal. The formality of your work could make or break your writing. Different formalities are used depending on the task, examples of work requiring different levels of formality include assignments, emails, proposals or blog posts. Certain language and words can be used when it is informal such as slang terms, but you wouldn’t find these in a professional document.
- Domain – categories in this are academic, business, general, email, casual, and creative. Depending on these domains, Grammarly assesses the writing based on the rules and conventions of writing. Academic writing would strictly apply to all writing rules and conventions, whereas creative writing allows for intentional bending and stylistic flexibility of rules and conventions.
- Tone – this is based on emotion and Grammarly allows you to pick multiple options in this section, such as; neutral, confident, joyful, optimistic, friendly, urgent, analytical, and respectful. This is all dependent on how you want your writing to sound as another person reads it. However, this feature is still undergoing work by Grammarly to improve suggestions.
- Intent – the choices are to inform, describe, convince, and tell a story. This also allows for multiple choices by us and is still undergoing work to be improved by Grammarly, but its basic function is to set your narrative of writing.
Why is Grammarly Good For SEO?
So, we have discussed plenty of features for Grammarly, but why is it so important for SEO?
Not only is Grammarly a great tool for checking general writing mistakes, for SEO, it can:
- By correcting basic mistakes, Grammarly helps you rank in Google. This is because the Google bots are getting smarter, so people who used AI generators in the past, cannot rely on this method anymore. The text must make sense now to both readers and Google and Grammarly can help review that.
- The plagiarism check that Grammarly uses checks billions of web pages, some of which you may have used for research. It can sometimes be difficult to phrase a sentence and this may lead to phrasing your writing just like the research you conducted, which is counted as plagiarism. Google doesn’t like plagiarism which can only be bad for your SEO so Grammarly can help.
- Grammarly uses an analysis tool to score the quality of your text. If the Grammarly bot likes the readability of the writing and you gain a higher score, it is more likely that the Google bots will also like it and have positive impact on your SEO campaign.
- The cost of Grammarly is reasonable. Although the cost of Grammarly was included in our cons list, it is actually still worth it for businesses. The cost is a small expense considering how much it can aid you in SEO and eliminate costs of other tools used for plagiarism checks like Copyscape.
So, is Grammarly worth it? This has to be an unequivocal yes. The positives greatly outweigh the negatives and it helps so many people. The tool not only makes your writing life much simpler, but it can teach you how to improve your writing and gives confidence that your writing is strong before sending it off. The fact that so many of its features help with SEO campaigns, Grammarly is a strong tool. From the perspective of a SEO agency who uses Grammarly on a regular basis, I love it and I even checked this article with Grammarly!