Google BERT Update: What is it and why is it important

by digitactix-team Sales & Marketing

You all must have heard about the BERT update from an SEO agency near you. If you were and are still wondering what is BERT all about and why is it so important for your brand’s search engine presence, don’t worry, you are at the right place. For months there has been a rising need to design SEO strategies and practices in favor of natural search queries, i.e: search queries that come in the form of a full conversation like sentence instead of separate words. With the rise in the usage of virtual assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, etc natural search queries will make up for a huge majority of the billions of the search queries that come in every day. Let’s take a look at what the Google BERT update is and how it will impact your company.

What is the Google BERT update?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The Google BERT update is said to be the most important update of all time.The best SEO companies in Mumbai have been planning to capitalize on this update for a very long time. As discussed before, conversational queries are rising in huge volumes. Com-score has released characteristics that prove that show 50% of search queries being from voice inputs. Not only that, 70% of total searches today can be considered as long-tail keywords. The BERT update helps Google to understand these queries better and return search results better suited for these queries. The update was rolled out worldwide in December 2019. The BERT update has been applied to more than 70 languages that the world’s largest search engine supports. These are:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified & Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian Malay (Brunei Darussalam & Malaysia), Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek & Vietnamese.

The BERT algorithm takes help from Natural language processing(NLP) techniques to bring better quality search engine result pages(SERPs). NLP techniques help computers to analyze, understand and extract data from human language inputs in a smart way. Therefore this update will make marketing brands on Google using SEM and SEO practices even better for digital marketing companies since they will have a much more accurate idea about what users are looking for and what kind of users to target.

Let us take an example of the query:” how to catch cow fishing?”

The word cow means a striped bass fish among the people of New England and many people love to catch it as a game. Before the BERT update, if you would put in this search query, Google would bring you results relating to cattle and livestock. Now when you type the same query it provides you results relating to the striped bass. It added context to the word cow using the word fishing and brought very accurate results.

How will BERT impact your search engine optimization?

If your website content is not engaging and colorful for humans, Google isn’t going to consider you very important. This update will focus more on the quality of the content you post on your websites and blogs. A lot of sites have experienced a drop in traffic due to the update and some have experienced a spike. Why is this? Because the update now wants you to focus on writing for humans, rather than writing content to be in the algorithm’s good books. Here is what we found that clearly describes what the best Online Marketing companies in Mumbai are doing for bringing sites up and what you should be doing in order to make the most out of the BERT update.

Be as specific as possible: The content you write should be as specific as possible for the niche you are writing. Your content should specifically answer questions. For eg: If somebody wants to learn more about internet marketing, answer questions about what to learn in digital marketing, or talk about a few tips on how to run better ads, the list is very large. Your content should solve problems created by certain long term keywords put in by users because if it does then Google will recognize it as the optimal search result for the

Quality content backed by research: Do some detailed research on what you are trying to write about. Educational or not, you must write content that gets the reader hooked. Correct grammar and spellings and tell stories in your content pieces. Use facts and statistics in your content so that your content is more realistic. For eg: “If you are talking about why Social media marketing is important, provide statistics relating to how many users are there on the best social media platforms, the age groups, devices used to access these sites and so on.”

Convert but don’t apply direct sales practices: Your sales conversions must not be in the face. The call to actions must blend with the content and must indirectly make a user take an action. The conventional call to actions and high-pressure sales tactics won’t work. Your users must be inspired and motivated to convert, they must not be forced.

Conclusion:

BERT will pave the way for the increasing use of voice search and long term keywords and this is something SEO companies will have to look forward to when it comes to building SEO strategies for themselves and clients. SEO and content writing will now be easier since you need to understand more of user behavior than algorithm behavior. It makes Google more of a search ‘assistant’ than a search ‘engine’ and this will help brands connect better with the right audience. We understand that there is a ton of marketing potential to tap at this point, and that’s why we are deeply strategizing on how to capitalize over the BERT update. Want to improve your revenue generation through Google? Get in touch with us, an award-winning SEO agency. At Digitactix, we aim to grow nascent brands into unstoppable digital voices by harnessing the power of search engines using result-oriented SEO practices. With in-depth research, detailed strategizing and SEO executing techniques that are always a step ahead from your competitors, we ensure that brands receive traffic at an explosive growth rate.

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