Google are known for coming out with surprising updates which tend to startle web marketing experts everywhere. The latest Google update is supposedly the biggest in five years – but what does it mean? Find out what we know about the BERT update below.
What Is Google BERT?
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This natural language tool is designed to affect complicated search queries. It is thought that this will depend on the context of the search. In the past, Google was not able to understand certain contexts around searches effectively and this led to lesser results. Bert is a new approach that can be used on a larger body of text and this is very interesting. While we may have relied on keywords in the past, we really need to branch out and consider our long-form content and contextual queries.
The Impact On SEO
One of the biggest impacts of new algorithms from Google updates is on SEO. How do we optimise our websites to stand out amongst the many Google results when it keeps changing? Interestingly, this new update is said to impact the websites which are written poorly the most as the focus of the page needs to be strong.
According to the experts, BERT will improve the understanding of search queries by Google. While you might think that the focus of Google is on analysing the web pages, BERT will actually analyse the query instead. This is very different to what we have seen before and it will be interesting to see how this grows. Context is everything when you ask a question in real life so why not when you are searching for something on Google? Google have obviously been working on this for a while and they have done a great job of bringing it together in one update.
What Does This Mean?
Many experts believe that this new update makes it relatively difficult to optimise for SEO but there are some ways around this. With the BERT update, we have a lot more opportunity to bring traffic that is focused to our sites in order to really make some conversions. Our visitors will be coming to us for the right reasons, because Google is providing results based on the intent of their search.
It is expected that Google will make some more updates and that this tool will grow more over time. For now, you can use this algorithm to perform some more context-reliant searches and see it for yourself. Make sure that any sites you have are taking this into consideration in order to retain rankings in the future.
If your having trouble understanding Google Bert or think your website has been effected, contact our team for a chat.