Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a key role in enhancing the visibility of websites or web pages in an online search engine’s unpaid results. SEO BERT is an algorithmic update to Google’s search engine designed to better understand the natural language processing of websites, with the primary objective of understanding user queries more contextually and providing more accurate search results.
BERT stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”. Introduced by Google in 2019, BERT uses Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the nuances and context of words in sentences and how these interact with each other. Importantly, BERT is bidirectional, which allows it to understand the context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it.
Google explains the BERT update as follows: “These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results” (Google, 2019).
BERT’s impact is most noticeable in ‘long-tail’ search queries. For example, the query ’2019 brazil traveler to the USA need a visa’. Previously, Google’s algorithms might have interpreted this phrase as relating to U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil, due to the inclusion of “USA” and “Brazil”. But with BERT, it is understood that the phrase is asking if a Brazilian traveler going to the USA in 2019 requires a visa.
SEO strategies need to evolve with this update and focus on creating content that answers queries as specifically and helpfully as possible. BERT will preference content that provides meaningful answers to the questions users are asking and may negatively impact pages with unclear or irrelevant content.
According to Moz, an online SEO tool platform provider, “BERT affects one in ten searches. It represents one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.” Given the impact of this update, marketers should focus their efforts on producing high-quality content that genuinely serves users’ needs while following an SEO strategy, using relevant keywords correctly within the content.
BERT is a significant step forward in contextual understanding of search queries, which can ensure more relevant and accurate search results for users. SEO specialists need to prioritize content that provides clear, concise, and meaningful answers to users’ queries to gain benefits from this update.
References used:
1. Google Blog: Understanding Searches Better Than Ever Before. https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert
2. Moz Blog: Welcome BERT: Google’s Latest Search Algorithm Update. https://moz.com/blog/welcome-bert-google-s-latest-search-algorithm-to-better-understand-natural-language
