Tired of reading? Listen instead!

by Mauro

BERT is the new update to the Google algorithm. And these latest changes are good news for SEO experts.

Keep reading to learn how it affects web search and website rank.

What is Google BERT

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is an open source algorithm that works through Google's neural networks and seeks to improve natural language processing Share on X

In other words, this algorithm does not analyze the content or the keywords used in web pages, but rather the language that users use to search the Internet.

Thanks to Machine learning technology, Google can better understand queries and content. It is about discovering the context by looking at the words that come before and behind the most important terms.

How Does It Affect Your Website Rank?

The new Google BERT algorithm update will completely change the way the search engine returns results.

It is one of the most important changes in recent years. And now it will be possible to offer more context-based and therefore much more accurate responses to meet the needs of users.

1. Understanding the context helps understanding the user

The technology used by BERT allows Google to better understand all queries. It uses context to understand sentences as a whole and not as a series of single words.

Google Artificial Intelligence often interprets the words one by one. This added to the fact that in natural language the sentences are usually longer, makes it difficult to offer results that really fit what the user is looking for.

With BERT, Google tries to better understand how words are related to each other.

2. Writing in a more natural way will be a reality

When users search the Internet, they often do not know what terms to use.

The BERT update includes a better understanding of the language people use, no matter how the words are spelled or combined, to find exactly what the user is looking for. Share on X

3. Analyze featured snippets even in other languages

Featured snippets are the response boxes or direct Google responses that appear on the results page as soon as you make an inquiry.

Natural language processing aims to better understand users and the longer queries they make. In this way, Google will be able to offer a result that exactly responds to the query made by analyzing the context.

4. The end of searches focused exclusively on keywords

Google wants users to write more naturally, focusing on the reader and not Google.

One of the issues that harm page autority or penalize its positioning, is appearing in results for keywords that are not even within the content.

Besides, if visitors land on your page and don’t find what they were searching for, chances are they won’t return either. And that is bad news if you are trying to monetize your website.

Keywords will continue to be important to SEO. But the BERT update will generate more useful search results by looking at the context of the searches. So, write for the reader – not for Google.

Conclusion

As you can see, the algorithm no longer analyzes content, but rather the language of user searches. So, keep creating original and interesting content for your audience.

The only difference is that now you can focus more on the end user, and write in a more natural language.