What is the Google BERT update?
Did you know that Google has made a huge change to its algorithm? Google has announced their biggest change to their algorithm in FIVE years, affecting one in ten search queries. With the Google BERT Update, Google aims to improve the interpretation of complex long-tail search queries and display more relevant search results. In short, Google is trying to make search more about answering questions or phrases people are asking as opposed to just keywords.
What does BERT mean?
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and refers to an algorithm model that is based on neural networks. With the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine systems attempt to interpret the complexity of human language. You can find detailed documentation of BERT on Google’s AI blog. Google is constantly trying to make search results more relevant and more important with intent and with the help of AI, search is becoming smarter and more importantly more accurate. If anyone has used Google Translate often, you can see how it is becoming smarter and learning intent more, that is because it is gathering so much data and the AI is helping to decide the proper translation.
Where is BERT being rolled out?
BERT has been rolled out to organic search in the US and will be rolling out to other countries soon with no fixed timeline. EU countries will be seeing this rollout soon, however, Featured Snippets have been rolled out in 25 languages. Featured Snippets are the results that appear in organic search at the zero position which include text, table or list. Since there is not a fixed timeline, when searching you can put phrases or questions and see what responses you get, if the responses become more accurate to your question, then BERT most likely is being utilized in your EU country.
How to catch a cow fishing…excuse me?
The best example of how BERT is changing search is the example of the phrase ‘how to catch a cow fishing’? What image comes to your mind, literally a cow fishing?? Well, in fishing, a ‘cow’ refers to a large striped bass therefore the phrase is related to fishing and not cows. Before the BERT update, pictures and snippets of cows were being shown in the search results. Now, the search results are showing videos and articles related to bass fishing.
How will BERT affect your SEO?
In short, if you have been focusing your recent content on long-tail phrases you shouldn’t see any major issues with your SEO. If you have been writing your content and only keyword stuffing, you can see a significant decline in SEO since your content is not directly answering questions being asked or searched. In the last year, in learning to write better blogs, we have been utilizing Google.com only for long-tail phrases and related content that is being searched. We get questions related to the topic from the bottom where Google suggests top questions being asked as well as using the search box to begin typing and let Google autofill the questions/phrases. Ultimately, we have stayed away from just keywords and using just phrases that people are searching to get more traffic for my posts. If you are writing blogs you should follow this style since people are asking phrases or questions and expecting fast results.
Going forward, how do I continue proper SEO techniques?
Think about your personal search history, how do you look for things online? With the convenience of Siri and Google Assistant as well as IoT things (Google Home and Amazon Echo), you simply just ask and you usually get the answer. Before, without these assistants, you would most likely just type some keywords and hope to find the information. Now that Google Search results are adapting to how we search, content creators are adapting as well, therefore getting their matched more accurately. From now on, write your web content for humans and not search engines, search is looking for answers to spoken natural questions. Use search engines to help you find phrases about your topic or content to make your SEO stronger and more effective. The old days of keyword stuffing and keyword search are long gone, which is good because you can now write more naturally. If you have been up to date with SEO techniques, this major update shouldn’t affect your SEO too badly. This update may give you a new opportunity to rebrand your old content and adapt your content to a more natural spoken language which may boost your SEO to old posts.