For SEO purposes, is it better to use straight (') or curly (’) apostrophes and quotes?
Note: straight quotes are also referred to as 'dumb quotes'
curly quotes are also referred to as ‘smart quotes’
Apparently, using smart quotes (‘ ’ “ ”) on your website was an issue in the past, but these days Google et al. seem to automatically convert them. See e.g.:
So, the takeaway is:
Smart quotes used to be bad for SEO, but they don’t seem to have any negative impact on search results today.