This October 25th, Google announced a new search algorithm which has come up with major new updates. This new Google search algorithm update could affect 10% of all search results. Although 10% doesn’t seem like a significant number, it looks like a lot of traffic to your website decreases and also your online sales. As Google is the aggressive force in search, people in the search engine optimisation community are always sensitive to changes in their algorithms. And Google has solved this problem with some new algorithm updates called BERT. BERT refer to Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
Here come a few questions in every person mind like What is BERT? Which search types will BERT affect? How will BERT impact the searches? Does your website be affected by BERT? How to optimise your website for BERT?
Let’s talk everything about the BERT and its search results.
What is BERT?
Google describes Bert as an open-sourced neural network-based technique for natural language processing pre-training. In other words, BERT exactly means that it is a technology that enables to train system to understand the language more as humans do. By applying BERT search engine algorithm model which will allow Google’s search engine to examine the relationship between all the words in the query rather than one by one to determine the exact intent of the user’s search.
By applying BERT models to both rankings and featured snippets in search, helps to find useful information. BERT will help search better understand 1 in 10 searches when it comes to ranking results in the US in English. And this will come to more languages and locales over time. Particularly for longer more conversational queries or searches that contain the prepositions like for and to matter a lot to the meaning of the context. Now by applying the BERT algorithm search engine will understand the context of the words in your query. Now you can explore in a way that feels better and natural for you.
Which search types will BERT affect?
BERT will never impact every search query. BERT will affect approximately 10% of all Google searches. There are 5.6 billion Google searches per day among them; 10 % means 560 million searches will be impacted. BERT will help to understand better what the searches want to know; it’s not going to affect the most precise queries. For instance, if you are searching for Flower pictures, you will get images of flowers. Same way if you are searching for beauty parlour near me, then you will get the list of beauty parlours near me. But if you are searching for flower pictures beauty parlour near me, then BERT will come into the picture.
BERT impacts the longer and more nuanced search queries. BERT will help you understand conversational language, prepositions, negatives and some other words which search engine had not paid attention previously. This doesn’t mean that every longer query will be impacted. A full sentence query with no ambiguity will probably still return a similar result.
How will BERT impact the searches?
In Google official website, Google has provided several examples regarding queries, how BERT will allow their search engine to understand user intent better. Let’s see with an example, pass the search query as “2019 brazil traveller to the USA need a visa”.
Previously the search engine is not able to understand the significance of the word “to” in the search query. So just by analysing the words traveller, brazil and USA in isolation, the search engine will return results relating to travel from the USA to Brazil along with travel from Brazil to the USA.
On the other hand, with BERT the search engine will understand the word “to” in the search query which results from the exact search results from the search engine which are most relevant results about travel from Brazil to the US rather than the other way around.
Does your website be affected by BERT?
Every website will anyhow be affected by BERT, with just 10% of the queries will be affected. It doesn’t mean BERT will impact 10% of the website’s questions. How much is dependent on a few things:
- The content that you generate
- The typical target audience behaviours
- The traffic you get at present.
If you mostly rely on the blog posts to drive more traffic based on the questions that your consumers ask, then you are the one who will be more impacted by the BERT algorithm. Impacting by BERT is not a bad thing to hear. It means that you will get better ranking and get more organic traffic.
How to optimise your website for BERT?
Whenever Google comes up with the new update, the first thing that comes to website owners is how to optimise their website to benefit from the BERT algorithm and raise its ranking. Google announced that there is nothing to optimise for BERT as BERT algorithm has nothing to do with the content on your site. It is useful to understand the intent of queries submitted by the users. For those who want to rank well, Google advices that write the content for users, not for the algorithms. Google goal is to deliver its users the most useful and relevant results to their queries.
Final Thought
Google has made changes in the algorithm. The BERT algorithm update aims to enhance Google’s search by better understanding user query intent. BERT impacts 10% of queries, often unnoticed by site owners who track shorter queries, unlike BERT’s focus. BERT focuses on queries, not website content. Website owners optimize by generating relevant, high-quality content beneficial to searchers.
BERT makes it essential for you to have a marketing strategy in place, including a locally optimised website, keyword-rich content and consistent business listings.
Krify is the leading website development company in India and the UK having hands-on digital marketing strategies. Our marketing executives are up to date with all the algorithm and are capable of handling as per the updates of the Google algorithms. For more details, contact us now.
