Spelling, grammar, and the words Google shows about you

The first words a patient reads about your practice aren't on your website at all. They're the title and the line of description Google shows in the search results, before anyone clicks. If those carry a typo or a clumsy bit of grammar, that's the first impression — formed on the strength of a sentence you may never have read, because it was generated years ago or written by whoever built the site.

It gets worse once they arrive, in a way that matters more for a dentist than for most businesses. Small errors in the copy chip away at confidence without the reader quite noticing why. A patient can't assess your clinical skill from a website; they have no way to tell from a screen whether you're a good dentist. So they judge the things they can see — and the copy is the most visible of them. "Paediatric" misspelt on the children's page, or "adverse affects" where you meant "effects", reads, fairly or not, as carelessness. And carelessness is the one trait nobody wants in the person holding the drill.

The most common version of this is almost too ordinary to notice: a practice's own name, misspelt. We've audited sites where the practice name is spelt wrong in every browser tab — the page title that sits behind every Google result and at the top of every tab — and nobody had spotted it in years, because you stop seeing your own site after a while. The patient, seeing it fresh, sees it immediately.

None of this is hard to fix. It's an afternoon with a careful eye, or a single proofreading pass by someone who didn't write it:

What to check on your own copy

Your page titles and descriptions — the words Google shows in the results. Read your own search result for a few key pages; that is the first thing a patient reads.
Every service page, slowly — the clinical pages especially, where a misspelt treatment name does quiet damage.
Your own practice name, everywhere — in the tab titles, the footer, the headings. It's the error that's easiest to miss and worst to leave.
Consistent South African spelling — "organise", "colour", "centre" — not a mix of US and SA that reads as copy-pasted.
A second pair of eyes. You can't reliably proofread your own writing; someone who didn't write it will catch what you cannot see.

There's a search angle too, not only a trust one. Your page title and description are part of how Google understands and displays your pages, so clean, accurate, well-written ones help you both read better and rank better — a rare case where the thing that builds trust also helps you get found.

The point underneath all of it: spelling is a proxy. A patient deciding whether to trust you with something that frightens them is looking for reasons to feel safe, and reasons to worry. Careless words hand them the second. It isn't that a typo proves anything about your dentistry — it doesn't — but a nervous person reads carelessness on the page as carelessness in the chair, and you don't get to argue with the impression once it's formed.

Catching and fixing this is part of the copy pass we do when we build a site — but reading your own pages with a cold eye, and your own search result, is something you can do today.