Google BERT: Why It Is Important For Your Website

Google recently introduced the BERT update, which has been called the biggest update in five years and most important after RankBrain was launched by the search engine giant. As per the update, only 10% of search results on Google will be affected. Should you bother about this update? Do you know why it is important for your website? As the best-rated SEO agency, we will answer all your queries in this blog.

What is Google BERT?

BERT is Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which is a natural language processing model. Now you must be thinking why would an NLP model matter to your website and its SEO campaign?

BERT uses machine learning to understand the content better. With advanced NLP, BERT can determine the context in a sentence and relations between words to identify if they are correctly being used in the given topic. This will help Google to display the most relevant results for a search query.

If you search “what is BERT” on Google, a featured snippet shows that BERT is a pre-training approach for understanding text from the web.

When asked about the BERT update, Google said:

Google has introduced the BERT update in October 2019, but BING is already using BERT in its search engine algorithms since April 2019. It is expensive to use BERT in search engines but Microsoft’s Azure has made it affordable for BING.

BERT: Explained

BERT is

B – Bidirectional

E – Encoder

R – Representations

T – Transformers

BERT is a natural language model that brings several features required for understanding content on the web:

Pre-training from unlabeled text

BERT follows bi-directional learning from unlabeled text. It understands text cohesion from a large content and fine-tunes its memory through smaller tasks while self-learning in this process.

Bi-directional contextual models

BERT’s architecture allows it to identify ambiguous words. It focuses on a single word and then identifies the context of the entire sentence in relation to that word.

Masked Language Modelling

BERT architecture randomly masks some words in a sentence and then tries to find out the hidden words.

Textual entailment

You love Google but it finishes your queries before you even type it. This is because of the textual entailment feature available in BERT.

Who Will Be Affected By Google’s BERT Update?

BERT won’t support websites that are poorly written.
Websites using long-tail keywords might get affected.
Websites that were previously being displayed in the featured snippet section of Google.
Performance of the awareness content or acquisition performance for sales funnel’s top content.

What to do for Google’s BERT Update?

You cannot optimize your website for BERT. Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, wants website owners and SEO markers to create content that is unique, compelling, and useful for the users.

What you can do?

Write relevant content that solves customer’s problems
Create valuable content that responds to the searcher’s intent
Develop content to satisfy the motivation of your users
Write content that creates wonderful experiences for customers

BERT Myths

Since the introduction of the BERT update, we found many articles on the Internet claiming that they have mastered the art of optimizing a website for BERT. Here are some myths and misinformation that are circulating on the web and you must avoid them:

Myth – Optimize your site for long-tail keywords

The BERT update has nothing to do with long-tail keywords or a one-word keyword. It is all about creating useful, unique, and relevant content.

Myth – BERT will affect only a small number of websites

Although it has been said BERT will affect 10% of search queries, 10% is significant when the number of websites is in millions.

Myth – BERT gives emphasis to stop words

Stop words such as a, an, the, to, on, in, with, etc. have nothing to do with the functioning of the BERT algorithm.

BERT Affects Content Marketing

As we stated above, the BERT update is all about content. Businesses should focus on publishing relevant content on their websites. Google with the help of BERT will work more humanely. It will answer search queries as quickly as possible and provide more value than ever before.

Where to start?

Perform a SERP analysis:

You can hire the best rated SEO Company to get insights into your keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, content relevancy, and much more. An SEO agency remains updated about Google’s updates and can help you optimize your site for better results.

Create relevant content:

If you have already published web content, get help from an expert content assistant of your agency. As your content creator to write for humans, and not machines.

Discover ranking opportunities:

Users often have numerous queries in their mind when they look for products or services. Don’t limit your blog section to answer just one query. Check the “People Also Ask” section in Google SERPs to find questions that people are asking and answer them in the best way possible.

Conclusion

After the BERT update, if you want to rank higher than your competitors and want more targetted traffic, then answer people’s queries better than other websites. Add videos, images, infographics, graphics, charts, graphs, stats, etc. to create a better experience for your users.

Only the best rated SEO Company remains vigilant about Google’s recent updates and helps its clients optimize their website accordingly. Source Soft Solutions is a digital marketing company that provides the best online reputation management services, SEO services, content marketing, social media marketing, and PPC services. We will perform a series of SEO and content audits on your website to determine how it is being affected by the BERT update and what needs to be done to improve its search ranking. Contact our marketing experts at +1 (609) 945-4955 or send your queries to reachus@sourcesoftsolutions.com.