In October of 2019, Google introduced us to BERT. This was not to be a yellow puppet with a nasally voice and a shock of black hair — this was to be a revolution in how search queries are understood. In fact, Google has touted BERT as its most significant update in FIVE years once it was announced in 2019— an evolution of the natural language processing technology introduced in the previous Hummingbird, Panda, and RankBrain updates.
Stressed? Scared? Intimidated? Don’t be. Google loves to provide big, show-stopping updates. BERT won’t hurt your traffic or earnings as long as your content is natural, authentic, and is written for people first and not just search engines. On the contrary, BERT will help you in the long run. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which is really just a fancy way to say that it interprets each word in a search query in relation to the other words within the search (i.e. bidirectionally). In other words, BERT strives to put context to language by considering all the words in a phrase, much like a human would in conversation.
What BERT Means for Searchers
If you have a very specific question you want to ask Google, BERT will help answer it more accurately. If your search terms include slang, colloquialisms, or words with double-meanings, BERT will use cues from elsewhere in your query to determine what you actually mean. Long-tail search queries, or those that are three or more words, will not bog BERT down. They’ll actually help cater highly relevant and useful content directly to your fingertips.
Right now, BERT only affects 1 out of 10 organic searches in U.S. English. However, BERT is internationally active when it comes to Google’s featured snippets (the boxed-off excerpts from an especially relevant website at the top of search results) — in two dozen other languages, in fact.
What BERT Means for Website Content
As it evolves, BERT should actually empower content creators. Because you won’t be focusing on keywords as much, the overarching topics and ideas of your work will be allowed to capture the limelight. Also, since BERT can better comprehend long-tail search queries, you can get much more specific and niche with what you write about. That may cut down on the overall traffic quantity, but the quality of that traffic should be much higher — and convert better.
If you'v been guiding your content with keyword research, not to worry. As long as that content is well-written and pertinent to your readership, you won't suffer any penalties.
What BERT Means for SEO
BERT doesn’t mean keywords and keyword research are dead — focused, organized, and compelling on-page content is still going to be rewarded through better engagement and conversions. It just means Google is taking a backseat to the user in terms of your intended audience. Believe it or not, Google has even admitted that it wants it that way. Google realizes that the generated searches are going to be looked at by humans, who are the main determinates of whether those search results are relevant or not. What better way to narrow down keywords effecively into relevant search results than to trust the opinion of the people makes those exact searches?
This means that when you're generating keyword-focused content for your website, you should write with the audience in mind. What would they want to know? How can you make your content more engaging and less robotic? Write naturally and conversationally, not in “Keyword-ese.” Bogging down your content with too many keywords is actually a practice that could hurt you in the long run (that's right, Google's onto you).
That being said, other elements of search engine optimization such as alt tags, meta descriptions, URL and file names are still important, especially on pages that emphasize media elements over written content. All these things help communicate to Google what you’re looking for. The more honed in on that it becomes, the more all will benefit.
Attract the right audience with Search Engine Optimization Services from Epic Web Studios
BERT or no BERT, content development and SEO strategy work hand in hand. Fill your website with content people want to see and read, and Google will make sure it finds its way to their screens. And if you're still not entirely sure what that means or how to execute it, there's no need to worry. Our team at Epic Web Studios actually gets excited about learning all there is to know with each algorithm update and we'll be on top of it all so that you don't have to. To get your website in front of more faces, contact Epic Web Studios today.