What is Google’s BERT Algorithm and How is it Impacting Your Business?
If you follow much in the world of digital marketing and the undisputed search god that is Google, you may be familiar with the many acronyms from ALT tags to SERPs and E-A-T (now E-E-A-T) to CWVs (Core Web Vitals) that help us all navigate and understand what makes it tick. A unique beast that you may not be familiar with is the B-E-R-T algorithm otherwise known under the catchy name of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
In the modern age of AI developments, an AI algorithm from 2019 might seem pretty prehistoric but B-E-R-T has been a major force in how you experience and deal with Google search for 5 years now and still being actively developed by Google with the latest version TW-BERT being announced last year.
What is the BERT algorithm?
The BERT algorithm is a natural language processing algorithm designed to apply added context to your search. When you enter anything into Google, your search can be interpreted several different ways. For example, if you were to search ‘bark’, it could be for tree bark, wood chips, a dog’s bark or even BBQ bark from brisket.
It’s BERT’s job to understand your search by using the surrounding words to provide the necessary context and it was designed to improve its understanding of our search habits over time to become even better at providing relevant search results for the queries we provide.
How does BERT impact search?
BERT was designed to provide context to words and to essentially connect the dots. This was incredibly helpful for Google search, where previously Google had struggled to provide relevant search results for their users and would often provide searches for every word in your search, regardless of your actual intent. For example, a search for ‘apple store’ was just as likely to provide you with local orchards as it was the latest in tech innovation.
BERT streamlined this across all elements of Google search, allowing for an easier overall experience for users. This meant heavy changes to how things like the local pack worked. No longer would Google showcase a local pack for every term but they would only show local packs for relevant terms. For example, ‘best car dealer in Nottingham’ and not ‘how to sell a car quickly in Nottingham’. This hasn’t always been perfect and has meant that certain deserving search terms have lost local pack rankings which has impacted businesses. However, it does mean that local search is a more powerful tool than it was before.
Another key area that was impacted was featured snippets. These are little snippets of content that are highlighted at the top of Google, usually in response to query based searches such as ‘how can I build muscle?’. BERT allowed these snippets to be far more representative of the actual search query and this meant that the more detailed the search query, the more precisely tailored your featured snippet would be, providing the end user with a quick answer and giving the business with the most relevant information a major boost in the rankings.
The change that BERT created essentially meant that the relevance of your content was most important and this meant that businesses that created content with the end user in mind came up on top while businesses looking to rig the system and simply dominate the results through ungentlemanly tactics were left struggling for air.
How does this impact your business?
BERT provided a massive shakeup to Google’s search rankings at the time and is a key ranking tool for Google today. By and large, Google is now providing more relevant search queries than ever before and this has pros and cons for your business in terms of how they are found in Google.
On the positive side, your business is now more likely to be found for the things you actually want to be found for. This means a higher chance of being found by your ideal audience and better chance of actually securing the sale. As mentioned above, it also meant that local search was now far more powerful and prominent in Google’s algorithm, which means that local businesses that provide quality local content can reach their ideal audience easier and typically it means that they can rank for terms they’d be unlikely to otherwise due to general competition.
On the negative side, it is now typically harder to rank for those major terms and your content needs to be on point. Long waffle designed to do nothing but cram in keywords is no longer going to cut it. BERT also means that businesses that have options for a specific niche but don’t specifically target that niche might struggle against businesses with more dedicated content. For example, a hotel that has a few dog friendly rooms might struggle to rank for ‘places to stay with a dog’ over somewhere that is purely dog friendly and called ‘Paws Doors’.
How to ensure your business is suited for BERT and Google
To protect your business from losing rankings due to BERT, it’s crucial to scrutinise your keyword performance and enhance your keyword choices. If you notice drops in key areas, it is likely that your content may not be particularly relevant for that niche or it could be that you simply don’t have enough content. Look into key queries for your customers using tools such as answerthepublic and start to add more locally focused keywords to your list to help you improve your visibility in key areas.
To support this, focus on optimising the relevancy of your Google Business Profile. The BERT update has been particularly impactful on local business rankings, so it’s essential to ensure your GBP profile is up to date and relevant. To do this, make sure to add localised images and user-generated local queries with answers to your GMB profile to increase its relevance.
Another critical step is to rectify any unnatural content on your site and drive relevant traffic. Review the pages that have dropped in rankings and check for unnatural keyword usage and readability issues. To benefit from the BERT update, start building long-form, valuable content that addresses common queries in your niche with natural internal links threaded through the content to allow for a better user experience. Keeping this in mind, including FAQs and using simple subheadings can make your content more engaging and relevant, helping it rank higher and making it more valuable for featured snippets.
How is BERT impacting the rise of AI?
It’s no secret that AI content has been the big thing to sweep digital content over the past few years and as one of the main content sources on the planet, it has impacted Google especially hard. Google has been incredibly proactive in terms of stomping out content they believe to be AI driven and deindexing a wide variety of sites (some of which were highly established) they deem to be making use of this content. Now, how much Google can really track AI content and how much they really want to snuff it out is up for debate; with the constant implementation of AI in Google’s search engine and the development of things such as Google Bard.
However, their commitment to high quality content is consistent with their overall message of prioritising user experience over just spamming content. How does BERT relate to all this? Well, BERT isn’t necessarily designed to track content, it’s designed to track user search to recommend the most appropriate content. However, BERT’s ability to understand context means that websites employing natural language and context-rich content tend to perform better in search results. This algorithm rewards high-quality, informative content. As a result, websites featuring well-researched, comprehensive articles are more likely to achieve higher rankings in search results.
So, the game hasn’t really changed with AI. Well-formatted, user-driven content is always going to perform better than content for content’s sake. This doesn’t mean that AI is strictly forbidden by Google but it does mean that you need to repurpose and retool what you get out of AI to make it more natural and user-focused, with the right headings and context.
Despite the changes brought by the BERT update, maintaining strong local SEO best practices remains crucial to help your business rank. By consistently applying the strategies above, you can mitigate the impact of the BERT update and maintain strong search engine rankings for your business even as Google continues to deal with the impact of AI content.
If you require support in understanding how to tailor your content towards BERT or simply want to get higher up those rankings, we can support you with content-driven local SEO marketing. With our proven track record, we can help up soar at the very top of those google rankings just in time for Google’s next game breaking algorithm.
