If you keep on top of news in the SEO world, you’ll have seen that in October, Google introduced its latest algorithm update – BERT.
But what’s it all about, and how does this latest algorithm update affect business owners looking to improve or maintain their search engine rankings? Here’s what you need to know:
What does BERT stand for?
BERT is an acronym that stands for: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
Sound complicated? It is.
In fact, BERT is much more than a standard algorithm update. It’s also an entire Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework produced by Google. Luckily, you don’t need to be an expert in NLP to understand how BERT impacts your SEO ranking.
BERT and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
One of BERT’s biggest functions is to understand natural language better, especially in conversational search. BERT allows Google to have a better understanding of the context of a user’s search. This means they can deliver the most relevant content based on the search intent.
One of the things that search engines – and machines in general- struggle with is when words have multiple meanings. Some words like ‘best’ and ‘even’ can be adjectives, nouns, or verbs depending on context. This makes it very difficult for a machine to understand the intended meaning in a particular sentence.
BERT is designed to fill in that missing piece of the natural language puzzle – the context. It uses pattern recognition to identify the most likely context for the use of a word in any specific scenario.
For more detail on the nuances of how BERT does this, Search Engine Journal has an excellent article that explains in more depth how BERT works.
What does it mean for your business?
With conversational and voice search on the rise, a greater understanding of context is becoming necessary to give people the actual content they’re looking for. People are searching longer phrases, looking for the answers to specific questions – and they expect to get an answer relevant to the question they asked. BERT makes sure that this happens more often, although it’s still not perfect.
For example, if someone is searching ‘New York to Philadelphia train,’ Google now understands the importance of that ‘to.’ Before BERT, it would potentially return results for trains in both directions. Now, users should only see information for trains traveling from New York to Philadelphia.
If you’ve seen a positive increase in your rankings since BERT, it’s likely that your content strategy is already focused on producing high-quality and relevant content. If you’ve seen a drop, it’s possible that your content isn’t providing the information people are searching for, despite being a good keyword match.
If the latter is the case, chances are that although you may have seen a drop in traffic, it’s unlikely that the drop will have resulted in a loss of sales. Those web visitors were unlikely to be looking for the product or service you’re providing .
So, while it might seem like a blow, it’s actually helping to drive more relevant, targeted visitors to your site – which isn’t a bad thing. Optimizing your content to be relevant and useful to your target audience can help you take advantage of BERT and gain more visitors who are ready to engage with your business.
How do I optimize my website for BERT?
Technically, there’s no specific SEO optimization needed for the BERT update. However, SEO experts have been sending the same message for a long time: search engines reward content that is relevant and interesting to your audience. This is still the best way to optimize your content for SEO.