By now, everybody wants to be aware of Google’s new update. The BERT update was introduced by Google with an intention to improve search accuracy. This has been said to be one of Google’s most critical releases of the year. The SEO community has been polarized since the start of this upgrade.

BERT reportedly concerns 10 per cent of search queries. This is a very big number, and on a daily basis, millions of requests are made. Google originally introduced this upgrade with a goal to better understand natural language processing. So, how does it affects your SEO?

Let us understand what BERT is exactly before understanding its effects on SEO.

What is Google BERT?

For those who have not yet heard the news about the current version of Google’s search algorithm, here is a short description of what it is and how it operates!

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representation for Transformer. This sounds very vague and confusing. So, let’s understand it in an easy way.

BERT is the latest version of Google’s algorithm, which is more focused on understanding the search query’s purpose better. BERT lets Google better grasp the whole sentence in order to provide more precise answers to the searcher instead of looking at the user’s question word by word. This update marks a big step forward in Google’s search to learn how people think. 

Should you change the way to do SEO?

The way you do SEO, there is absolutely no reason to change that due to BERT. You must also ensure that best practices and standards are practised all along. If you have a good framework for your keyword analysis and content development, there is nothing to think about.

While you hear quite a lot of arguments and chatter about the BERT update, but from the side of website owners, nothing changes. Many people who write web content should turn their interest into precise keywords for consistency and appropriate content backed by enough research. BERT adjusts which category of content to show for a query which covers to preserve the search efficiency.

What are the effects of BERT on SEO?

BERT can impact certain search pages. Therefore, if you see your pages are performing badly during the analysis, BERT causes that surely. Nonetheless, you may need to do some more work on that. Let me show you an example and give you an insight into how it works.

Suppose you find traffic to one of your sites has fallen dramatically over the last few months. Finally, you insert the query in Google and see that the highest quality ranking now stands for blog posts.

If you see want a successful SEO, you might think of repurposing it to take over the position in the top ten. That is because the type of content that should be delivered to the user for this particular question may have changed by BERT but the SEO method will be unchanged.

The chance of BERT impacting the webpages is insignificant and no alerts or warnings are needed right now. You need to be sure that your search efficiency is tracked regularly.

Below are a few important points to remember from the BERT update.

 

1 BERT is giving extreme significance to informational queries

 

Despite considerable importance, information queries tend to have more complexity than transactional or navigational queries. Most of the update is cracking down on these inconsistencies to have a more clear response. BERT impacts keywords that are at the top of the funnel, which are keywords relevant to the information.

Such informative questions are processed by Google into a method called masking. In fact, when you type a word in the search bar that describes something, Google investigates the word for any missed letter to find out what the user really is searching for in the process. Google would then try to give you the correct answers, even if the letters or words of the question were incorrect or not found in the query.

 

2 BERT focuses on long-tail keywords

 

Shifting the attention on long-tail keywords and questions is what you expect from the BERT update. It is more than just maximizing the keyword density of your text. The challenge is to provide searchers with straightforward answers to questions about exactly what they have asked in the search bar.

What you should do is to give laser-focused answers and organize the content around unique questions. The structure of your content is very important in this regard. You wouldn’t want to go through a huge piece of material when you’re searching for basic information and discover what you’re searching for on the website.

You should aim for a super-concentrated content that answers the questions of searchers straightforward. While it is not new in the SEO universe, BERT just seeks to advance it.

 

3 Longer Content has not much importance in BERT

 

When we get wrapped up in statistics from all around the world, we continue to assume that, usually, long content is favoured. But, with any new change, inevitably, this notion becomes a pure delusion.

We can’t say, however, that making shorter, more succinct material in SEO is a specific reality. It all depends on your question. Wide questions such as “what are the various types of Facebook Ads,” or “how to implement LinkedIn ads” would take lengthier and more detailed content. But basic queries such as “What is on-page SEO” or “what is a backlink” do not need a long material.

The key here is to provide true information that provides searchers with a reasonable yet clear response.

All in all

One of Google’s old-age advice was making professional content by thinking about the user in your head. You may have noticed longer content being rated, but according to the recent BERT update, more value is added than the duration of the content rating.

Content developers will also ensure that they keep track of digital media changes and put in the new website design requirements and improved rankings.

If your attention is on getting importance and information to your target market, there will be no problem will with any new update from Google. We can finish by suggesting that if you can produce outstanding content that addresses the pressing questions of your target customer, then you don’t need to customize it for BERT.

If you see the performance of your blog, a specific web page, or website is going down, you may need to rethink and implement your SEO strategy as soon as possible. Use this complete SEO tools to make your SEO best performing and result oriented.