At the core of Google’s functions, understanding search queries from millions of people a day is what Google does and what it need to continue to work on because that is what it is there for. Previously, we saw the implementation of RankBrain, which was designed to further help Google to understand what people were searching for, so in turn, it could provide better results for users.
As you could understand, this is a laborious task when you take into consideration different languages, different context from different areas and how one simple sentence could be structured a hundred different ways. Each person around the globe will have a unique way of speaking. This is why this most recent update is to be considered the biggest update for the last five years because Google’s machine learning capabilities have taken a huge step forward.
What is Google BERT?
BERT stand for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and is a deep learning algorithm that helps Google to understand natural language and what it means. Focusing of key words that will determine the meaning of a sentence.
Google’s AI blog mentions;
“BERT builds upon recent work in pre-training contextual representations — including Semi-supervised Sequence Learning, Generative Pre-Training, ELMo, and ULMFit. However, unlike these previous models, BERT is the first deeply bidirectional, unsupervised language representation, pre-trained using only a plain text corpus”
So what does this mean for content creation?
Because this is an update to better understand language, this will directly affect content through out your website. We expect to see that pages that have been well written, with good use of grammar too, will benefit from this update. This in turn will lower the visibility of websites that have little or poor content.
Here at Victory Digital, we expect this to not only target body content but also page structure and meta data, which touches on on-page optimisation. The screenshot from Google’s Blog, showcases how different search queries can be:
From this we can clearly see that the original query sent to Google is looking for more information on visa eligibility for the USA. Before this update, the top result would have been a news article about travelling with a visa to the USA. In the new BERT update, Google is now providing direct information about obtaining a visa for the states. This is the page that the user intended to visit and it provides direct information of a governing body, so the information given is accurate and up to date.
What you can do to take advantage of this update
If you think that certain pages are a little thin on content and provide little usable content, we recommend that you review and update the content on your page. Moving forward, it is clear that Google has intentions to improve on this AI and to really push to provide informative and actionable content within the search engine rankings.
Structuring your content will also be key moving forward. We already know that Google likes structured data, especially with Schema so now it looks like well structured (well written) content is now in the firing line. From this, making sure your content is focused and pretty much to the point will be key, remove your jargon and remove blabber that you previously used to ‘increase your word count’.
It may also depend on the kind of query your website responds too. Websites that provide questions and answers will be affected, while keywords that are more actionable may not get as much movement. Either way, it looks like 2020 will be an interesting year for search as Google is pushing the boundaries of longer tailed search queries.
What do you think? It would be great to hear your thoughts on this new Google update in the comments below.
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