.Digital marketing efforts in the modern age rely on a fair few areas. At one time, a basic web page might have been enough once. The competitive market we now face online means we should all be focusing on social media, programmatic advertising, and, as we’ll be discussing here, SEO.

As anyone who’s completed a real-life or online masters in marketing analytics should already know, search engine optimization is a cornerstone of all digital efforts. This, more than advertising efforts, will also result in increased interest, organic customers, and a great deal more traffic across digital platforms.

The trouble is that SEO in itself is changing fast. Never has that been more the case than with Google’s latest BERT update. Despite the seemingly harmless acronym, BERT has already led to mayhem across companies. This new Google focus stands for ‘Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers’. In fact, since its release back in October last year, our friend BERT has impacted around one in ten organic searches.

Becoming Best Friends with Google’s BERT

Of course, Google releases up to nine updates a day. It would be all too easy to ignore the risks BERT poses. But, with Google themselves claiming that this is “one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search,” you could argue that it’d probably pay to update your SEO efforts in the following ways.

Write for humans in a natural language.

Previous keyword focuses have seen many companies turning to search-friendly wording rather than actual human language. For instance, a keyword such as ‘marketing services New York’ would once have rated best by removing unnecessary joiners, etc. Which, incidentally, is precisely what BERT looks for.

Rather than simply picking up on pre-programmed basic words, BERT uses natural language processing (NLP) to accurately understand the context of both keywords and transformer like ‘of, the, it, etc.’. As such, this previous stripped-down keyword focus will never impress. Instead, it’s time to start writing blog posts, product descriptions, and more with your audience, rather than computers, in mind.

Nail down your niche.

BERT predominantly stands to impact organic searches, which might not be as much of a setback in your SEO game as you’re expecting. In fact, most of the searches that you’ll disappear from here are those that would have been irrelevant anyway. Instead, BERT ensures you’re better able to reach your niche with relevancy every time. All you need to do is nail down your niche at last, and make sure you’re creating the content they’ll want to see.

Keep quality at the forefront.

Quality has always mattered in SEO, but that’s even more the case now BERT’s on the team. With that contextual focus, you can bet this update will be even better able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Keyword-heavy or irrelevant content, therefore, doesn’t stand a chance. So, always make sure you’re writing informative, relevant, and well-researched articles and more to get on BERT’s best side, and start enjoying the update that’s sending the rest of the digital world into panic.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya