Some people have already started to see the effect of Google’s most recent algorithm update, BERT.
The search engine announced the roll out of BERT recently, indicating it will affect one in 10 search enquiries. What does this mean? It means there’s a high chance your website has already been impacted.
So what is BERT? In simple terms, Google has modified their algorithm to understand natural language queries better than ever before in order to give users more relevant results when conducting a Google search. The BERT acronym stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
How does BERT affect my searches?
One example of how the algorithm has changed is that Google will now take into account prepositions within a search query. Words such as ‘for’ and ‘to’ will now add meaning and context to a search term. These words appear within the text of a query and provide the search engine with clearer intent behind the search.
Other changes we will see is improved relevance in featured snippet results. These are usually displayed in boxes at the top of the Google search results page. They are more often related to question-type search queries and are displayed in a way that can help answer your query immediately, while also providing the most common questions searched around the topic. Other snippets include relevant text and images that are pulled from your site and placed in the Google search page.
Google continues to focus on the pursuit of providing relevant content for its users and BERT is a big step in that direction.
What does the Google change mean for my website?
It is important that you focus on writing and optimising your content for your audience, and not for Google. However, writing for your audience will in turn work for Google. The days of manipulating web content with lots of keywords are far behind us. It is important to focus on informative and engaging content for our customers. Don't get hung up on technical details such as keyword density; focus instead on writing quality content over quantity. When you do this, keywords will fall into place naturally.
Your website content now matters even more after Google's latest change
Because of these new updates, it's important to create specific content. A strong recommendation would be a separate page for each service you provide and create thorough content that tells the reader as much helpful and useful information about that service as possible. A good tip is to include answers to your most commonly asked questions.
One of the biggest opportunities for local businesses is to create regular highly specific content around a topic. Blog posts are a perfect way to do this. The better the written content is on your website, the better your chances will be of getting found on Google for longer search queries that relate to your business.
At Zimple Digital we have a professional content producer. Her role is to create blog posts for you and/or update your website content. Her experience is extensive, across multiple industries and business sizes. Contact us to find out how we can help your site improve SEO and content performance with our digital marketing services.
