Friday, February 21, 2020

Hi my name is BERT



The job of a skilled SEO strategist is to follow the drivers of what influences organic search results, and as a result, the major search engines. Google, being one of the largest makes changes to their engine algorithms to ensure the highest relevancy for users. Google has made significant strides (and is dominant) in search. One change to keep an eye on relates to their Artificial Intelligence (AI) enhancements that they believe will improve relevance over time. So know BERT, launched in October 2019. Also known as "Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding". Google is calling this one of their biggest leaps forward in the history of search.

BERT is expected to affect 1 in 10 searches, and is expected to learn the context of how words are used in language…and therefore search. What does this mean for SEO and Search? Two things come to mind:

(1)  Presumably this will provide a better user experience through more relevant search results.
(2) It will better reward those who create the best and user focused content.

SEO strategists can't optimize for this, but rather focus their clients on point #2 above. A win for users!

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