For the Everyday Digital Marketer - Google's Core Update BERT

Last year, Google reported that they made 3,234 updates to their search algorithm, averaging nearly 9x per day.

However, 99% of these updates are insignificant & bear no impact on search results. But what is important, is that 3-4 times a year, Google releases a CORE update. CORE updates adjust the core search ranking algorithm & can have major impact on rankings across all different industries.

On October 25th, Google released CORE update BERT. (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)

Background on BERT

Even with living & working daily at BrightEdge, the industry-leader in search, it still amazes me that 15-20% of searches conducted daily have never been performed before.

When users come to Google, many take to the search engine to engage and learn around topics they previously had little prior knowledge around. Because of this exploratory nature, the exact words, spelling, & query are often difficult to formulate. Additionally, users want to be able to perform searches in a low-effort manner & trust Google to be the authorator in regards to the content they will view.

BERT understands searches & user intent better than ever before, analyzing the string of words in relation to each other, rather than the meaning of each word individually. It is built on Google's Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence conjoint effort. The goal is to better understand searcher's intent by analyzing the context of the overall search query.

Initial data revealed that BERT affected results for 10% of all searches, making its impact both significant and widespread.

What is This Affecting?

As with all of Google's Core updates, they are meant to provide a better experience for searchers. By design, there is no magic formula on how to immediately rank better for BERT. Simply put, Google is continuing to promote & reward strong, accurate, and relevant content creation. They want brands focussed on providing their target market with the best possible experience & contributing to Google's index research library of information.

Using St. Elmo's 3-step purchase funnel phases of awareness, consideration, & purchase, this update will most impact top-of-funnel, awareness searches.

To illustrate this, I performed the search "What it is like to hike Everest?" Google features a "Quick Answer" snippet at the top from National Geographic that details how it is climbed. Below, is a "People Also Ask" snippet that understands what some of my other questions likely are given my initial query. National Geographic published this as a dedicated landing page to drive quality traffic to it, in the hopes that readers will gain awareness of National Geographic's offerings, engage with their content, & ultimately become a paid subscriber.

Note: BERT is most affecting long-tail searches (3+ keywords) which coincides with trends from Google on searches growing in length with the rise in popularity of voice search.

What Do We Do?

Now more than ever, using a keyword research tool for content creation is a must. This is my personal 3-step basic approach I advise on for top-of-funnel targeting:

1. Understand how your target market is searching by identifying organic keywords. Using filters like keyword contains question words "how" & "why" along with whatever topic you are analyzing.
2. Analyze intent, search volume, & competition levels to decide if it's an organic keyword worth targeting.
3. Identify what the search results page looks like to target regular listings, quick answers, people also ask, & more.

Identifying keyword opportunities around universal results like "Quick Answers" & "People Also Ask" boxes is a strong, data-backed approach to ensure content being created has the ability to be found on Google (Page 1) where we know 98% of search traffic comes from today. BERT is paving the way for more of that content to be found & for businesses of all shapes and sizes to have a chance to win out.

Write content the right away to ensure sure your brand is part of that 98%.