What do you think of when you hear “BERT”? If you are of a certain age you likely harken back to the days you spent watching Bert & Ernie’s odd couple hijinks on Sesame Street. While we all love a stroll down memory lane, this post is about a different BERT that was recently rolled out by Google.
According to Google, the BERT algorithm will help the search engine better understand user intent, leading to more relevant results. The company expects it to impact 10% of search queries. Despite being marketed as “one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search”, Google’s Danny Sullivan says there’s no reason to toss your content out with this week’s trash.
“There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.”
At its core, BERT is about using artificial intelligence to take a step forward in gauging user intent. According to Google, “these improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.”
Keep Doing What You’re Doing
In an age of swift overreaction, it’s not very sexy to say “keep on keeping on” but that’s exactly what you should be doing in terms of your online marketing content. With Google’s new algorithm striving to match up users with helpful content, you should continue to focus on producing relevant, helpful, useful content for your target audience.
In many ways, BERT is a continuation of Google’s efforts to reward the creators of quality content over folks who engage in search engine optimization tricks. For years the battle cry of search engine optimization specialists was “content is king”. That’s still true to an extent but, instead of cranking out hundreds of pages of content with questionable value to users, we’ve arrived at a place where GOOD content is king.
This should be an exciting development for you as someone who provides their users with high quality content geared toward their interests and needs. After all, why would you create content that your audience doesn’t care about? Why would you waste your time hammering out a blog post about something that doesn’t help your customers? BERT will help Google to better match users with your content so they can engage with your product or service.
Long live BERT!
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