BERT - how many here are familiar with this?

[SenseiSteve]

There's a great article about BERT on SearchEngineLand, https://searchengineland.com/faq-all-about-the-bert-algorithm-in-google-search-324193

BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing pre-training. In plain English, it can be used to help Google better discern the context of words in search queries.

I've seen some agencies say that this changes the emphasis on keywords and others say that keywords are still an integral element in SEO.

Your thoughts ...

 

[bigredseo]

From an SEO perspective, keywords are still important, but how the words are used, and the words that surround them in the sentence is where things have changed to. This is where BERT comes in.

We have our own interpretation of the BERT system here on our website - https://www.bigredseo.com/november-2019-google-local-update-confirmed/

The bigger part of the algorithm change was the synonym capability within a sentence. So the word "change" could be "adjust" or "convert" or "install" depending on the context of a sentence, and BERT is now smart enough to figure out what is being said;

"how do I change the memory on a laptop" - it seems like a simple question. When you add in the synonyms from BERT now it's smart enough to understand that you could has "how do I replace" or "how do I swap" or "how do I install". This is where the true power comes into play.

It vastly opens the doors from an SEO perspective in that now you're not targeting a single keyword phrase like "change laptop memory" but you can expand your article to use "install" or "replace" in various sentences. This gives you a whole slew of new keywords that you can rank for, and at the same time can devalue other phrases that just don't really hold any power anymore.