BERT is the Google’s Major algorithm update in the past five years. Any algorithm update from Google keeps many SEOs thinking about it whether it will impact their rankings or not will it slow down their website traffic or will it be useful for them, these questions will keep on roaming until and unless you get to know about the algorithm and how does it work.
So, what is BERT and how will it Impact SEO?
Google is using a new technology called BERT to understand search queries better.
The BERT algorithm stands for (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) sounds unlikely terms for an SEO because BERT is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing which is very complex.
In Simple term BERT helps Google to understand what words in a sentence mean and the context of the word is more important as there are different meanings for single words.
It’s more like the way you speak natural language/conversational queries, BERT helps Google search understand the context of the words in searchers and matches those queries with helpful results.
As Google said, in particular prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to BERT.
How will BERT impact On Page SEO?
BERT is all about queries, language and context. As an SEO and Content Writers we need to understand a poor and sloppy content where even humans can’t understand what’s your point? Time to optimize your content using more natural language which is understandable or your rankings will be affected.
On page SEO will become more precise in terms of writing content in a more precise ways which helps BERT to find queries more relevant to the searchers.
However, as Google said BERT will be used on 1 in 10 searches in the US in English. BERT is so complex that it pushes the limits of Google’s hardware.
But For featured snippets, Google is using a BERT model to improve results in all of the two dozen countries where featured snippets are available.
Examples of BERT:
Here’s a search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”. You can see how BERT helped Google understand that the query is about a Brazilian traveling to USA, not the other way around.
In the below example “Math Practice books for adults”: While the previous results page included a book in the “Young Adult” category, BERT can better understand that “adult” is being matches out of context, and pick out a more helpful result.
A Google spokesperson tells the examples are simply meant to illustrate the types of language understanding challenges that BERT helps with, but there are of course many other queries where BERT will have an impact, He also said BERT is only being used on 10% of English queries in the US.
Conclusion:
Google using BERT algorithm aims to improve the understanding of queries, deliver more informational and relevant results, and make searchers enter their queries in a more natural way.
