Using Google’s BERT To Your Advantage
BERT is a mouthful of an acronym standing for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and it’s a doozy.
By now you may know about Google’s latest algorithm update. It’s the biggest once since RankBrain and it’s called BERT. BERT is a mouthful of an acronym standing for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and it’s a doozy.
Digital marketers, particularly those that work with SEO in any capacity, are figuring out how to keep their client’s sites from losing page ranking. Because BERT has negatively impacted 1 in every 10 websites, it’s important to get a handle on best practices quickly.
What is BERT?
Quite simply, Google has found a way to understand user intent. For example, if your search parameters included “for” and “and” BERT is able to understand the context of that entire string of words typed into the search bar. Prior to this algorithm update, only strong keywords were picked up so your search results may have included information not pertinent to your search.
It’s a big deal for users. And, it’s a big deal for marketers because we need to have a deeper insight into who our users are and what exactly they are looking for.
Dealing With Humans
Traffic is going to go up on some website pages, and others will plummet. To keep your ship afloat, so to speak, content is really going to be the captain of that ship.
What that means to digital marketers is this: high-quality content on your web pages through your blog. Keyword stuffing is, even more, a thing of the past. Now it’s all about longtail keywords of 5 words or more. Natural language recognition, with natural speech patterns.
Topics thoroughly covered in human speech is going to be even more imperative. Luckily, there are sites like Answer the Public that can help formulate posts based on questions users are asking on every single topic. Sure, you’re going to still pull keywords from your typical tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and the like. But now, it’s super important to make sure those words flow seamlessly into sentences without sounding SEO’ish. Otherwise, Google will penalize that page, and it will barely see any traffic. Without website…
