Google rolls out BERT – one of its biggest updates ever!

Last week Google rolled out BERT, and it’s one of their biggest updates yet. The BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. It helps a machine to understand what words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context. Bert is a natural language processing pre-training approach that can be used on a large body of the text. It handles tasks such as entity recognition, part of speech tagging, and question-answering among other natural language processes. This is Google’s most advanced effort yet to understand natural language text from the Web. Sites that are only optimized for keywords and that are lacking entities will be least likely to benefit from this update. BERT is all about giving Google the ability to understand the nuances and context of words (Contextual Language Modeling) in searches and better match those queries with more relevant results. In short, Google aims to do a better job of providing the most useful information, rather than simply matching keywords.

Key takeaways from BERT?

1. At its core, this new update is focused on interpreting the intent of search queries better.
2. This is not an algorithm that penalizes anyone – It just is meant to better understand the user query and search intent. BERT models are applied to ranking and features snippets in search.
3. Leverage this opportunity by updating content that answers the questions of your target audience.
4. Content needs to be focused on solving the user’s problems. Include relevant entities in your content and use more natural language (content) around entities. Try to use “how to” schemas.
5. Add FAQs, conversational content and entities as part of your content strategy.
6. Look at your SERPs and optimize snippets for a better answer. We are noticing a significant upswing in impressions and clicks wherever we have used schemas and Conversational Search (Voice Search.)

In summary, Google’s core updates are designed to improve search quality. Penguin went after link manipulation and Panda went after content manipulation. BERT is more about understanding long tail natural language queries. These long tail queries are queries that businesses typically do not target because they send less traffic.

For more information about BERT contact us at sales@milestoneinternet.com OR call us at +1 408 200 2211

Sources: Google – https://lnkd.in/dG_hndu Search Engine Journal https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bert-update/332161/#close The hoth https://www.thehoth.com/blog/google-bert-update/