Google has made a recent announcement towards expanding their usage of specialized natural language understanding algorithms. This can become an evolution in how Google looks at content and the process of determining which goes to the top of search results. Likewise, this will have a change in how SEO is approached by business marketing companies going forward.
As an organic marketing agency 360 Business Marketing aims to stay on top of these new developments and give our clients the best in search engine optimization. By serving all across Canada and the United States we are well versed in adapting to new changes for our clients no matter their market or location.
Bert Growing to Possibly 100% of all Queries
BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a technique for natural language training that both Bing and Google have adapted to discern a words context.
Currently, it powers the vast majority of queries made in English on Google. Which is a significant increase from the 10% BERT used to work with when it was originally announced last year in October. Because of this much wider application; BERT will continue to develop and improve Google’s understanding of context and search intent.
Passage-Based Indexing in the Search Results
This change allows Google to identify individual passages on an article or page and interpret them depending on the possibility of them being relevant for an incoming query; even with the possibility it isn’t the main focus of the article or page itself. These passages are not technically indexed individually. It is estimated that this will apply to approximately 7% of queries spanning across all locations and languages when fully implemented.
Improving Misspelling
According to google potentially one in ten queries are mistyped or misspelled. To better accommodate for this and improve the search experience overall, the company has started developing advancements within language understanding to model edge cases in spelling errors. One such example is when the context is required to notice a misspelling or when the word is drastically misspelled.
What Does This Mean for SEO?
These changes could have the focus move away from bots back to the users from both a ranking and content perspective. Of course, your site still has to be apt for the GoogleBot to crawl it successfully and notice the passages and keywords.
Ever since Google put out Featured Snippets more focus has been placed on topical authority and much more focused content. Ever since then, SEO had developed into a mindset where bot the consumer or user and search engine were equally important when making content. With passage recognition, this could change; letting SEO relax more. Cutting down on unnecessary pages trying to cover every question a user might have.
Taking a Look into the Future
It is speculated that even though passage indexation is reported to affect about 7% of searches as this is refined and developed we can expect this number to significantly rise.
If Google keeps developing its natural language understanding then SEO can potentially escape having to rigidly create large amounts of pages optimized for a single keyword. Which makes browsing and navigating much easier on the visitor, while duplicate pages in this system have a hindering effect on the user experience.
AI can be aimed at removing these tradeoffs SEO faces, to not serve relevant results no matter the inquiry and how misspelled or obscure it could be or even where it may be hidden.
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