Google’s BERT Update Explained and Recovery Strategies

Contrary to what you might first think, Google’s BERT update has nothing to do with a beloved Sesame Street character. BERT: Biodirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It’s a mouthful, and for good reason. BERT is Google’s Fall 2019 update, providing the search engine with the most advanced query interpretation on the market. BERT enables web crawlers to deliver users the most accurate and relevant results by understanding queries in context, with nuance and pinpoint accuracy. BERT’s name is overwhelming, but understanding the update itself doesn’t have to be. We’ve broken it all down so you can understand what it is, what it does, and how to structure your SEO to make BERT work in your favor.

Launch Date: October 21, 2019

To understand the impact of this update, it’s important to note that BERT began rolling out in late October for English-language queries, marking a significant shift in how Google handles search.

What Google’s BERT Update Impacted

Google claims that Bert affects only 1 in 10 searches on the engine. But, as a principle, you want to make every search count. The good thing about BERT is that it’s not one of Google’s updates that penalizes sites or pages. However, there are a couple of reasons why you might rank lower than your competitors:

Wrong Keywords

As always, keywords are crucial. If you only have a narrow list of keywords or phrases, BERT will likely favor sites focusing on the terms users search for.

Unnatural Content

BERT is one of the most advanced and progressive updates to Google’s algorithm. As a result, it can better discern both context and user intent than ever before. That means users can enter a query exactly as they’d ask it, and BERT enables web crawlers to understand the query and find content that satisfies the user. If your content is written in an unnatural way or is cumbersome or full of jargon, chances are, you’re not going to like your page ranking.

How The BERT Update Works

BERT is a true revolution in how Google processes language and queries. The update is a technique that uses artificial neural networks to help computers understand human language more like people do. In layman’s terms, it gives Google greater ability to determine context in its users’ queries and provides better interpretation of those queries—and better results.

In the past, Google would interpret a user’s query word by word. With the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update, the search engine can now parse the entire query to provide more accurate search results. BERT is a natural language processing algorithm that reads query text in the same way a human would: as a whole thought, not as individual words. With BERT, context is king, which works out nicely for users, because this update understands user intent better than any other update that has come before it.

How to Adjust Your SEO Strategy and Recover

As we said, you won’t be penalized by the BERT update. The focus is less on finding “bad” sites and downranking them, and more on understanding user intent with greater nuance than ever. Still, there are small tweaks you can make to your site and content to give yourself the best chance of ranking high with BERT.

Write Long-form Content

The goal of your SEO when it comes to content creation is to answer the questions your audience is asking and provide the very best solution to their problems. One way to guarantee that you’ll be the best resource for them is to have enough quality long-form content on your page. In other words, have enough words so that your keywords and phrasing match the questions and queries users have.

Determine What is Causing Your Rank to Drop

If you manage your SEO, use Google’s Search Console to track your rankings. You can compare rankings over time to see which keywords or queries affect your status.

While this is a helpful tool and practice, it may not be BERT that is causing your rankings to change. Google makes multiple daily updates to its core algorithm because it’s constantly seeking to deliver the best possible user experience. Your fluctuations in ranking might be part of the natural ebb and flow of the massive—and ever-evolving—search engine that is Google.

Tweak Your Content

If your rankings drop, update your content. Answer questions differently, use new terms, address queries from a different perspective, or use different content types, such as images or videos.

Conclusion

In short, BERT has made Google smarter and more humanlike. As our desire for and access to information grow, and the information available to us constantly expands, having the BERT update to interpret our queries will give us the most satisfying results to date.