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The recent update to Google’s Algorithm aims to better understand natural language processing. It will affect roughly 1 in every 10 search queries — and undoubtedly have an impact on the traffic you’re getting to your site. Here’s everything you need to know about the change and the opportunities it’s opening up for those who use or provide content marketing services. What is the Update? Going by the name ‘BERT’— which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers — this algorithmic adjustment represents a shift towards a better overall user experience. With increased knowledge of prepositions and context, BERT promises more relevant results and hopes to boost natural writing within the search engine results pages, instead of awkward “keyword-ese”. Adjusting Your SEO Strategy There are three main types of queries that people tend to make when using a search engine: informational, navigational, and transactional. BERT primarily affects informational searches, where the user is asking a question to try and find something out about a topic they are unsure of. As such, keyword density is going to become increasingly less important. Google will be continuing to improve its algorithm so that it can better handle context and more closely match website copy to specific searches. It simply won’t be enough to churn out generic keyphrase-enriched content. Marketing services should therefore now be focused on producing useful pieces that answer highly specific questions in order to maintain their rankings. An Opportunity to Stand Out If you create this kind of specialised content around a relevant topic and aim to answer a searcher’s question as quickly as possible, your site will stand out among the competition. Short, snappy pieces featuring aesthetically pleasing videos and images will provide the best experience for the searcher, and so will thrive in the new ranking for informational keywords. Of course, long-form writing still has its place. After all, Google wants natural, user-friendly copy written with a reader in mind, and deep dives into topics provide just this. But given that many SEO content marketing services already prioritise longer posts as a simple way of targeting broad terms that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, your approach here also needs to be adjusted to focus on long-tail terms. Don't Worry BERT shouldn’t be a cause for concern. In fact, if your site has already invested in writing natural and specialised copy, you may even be able to anticipate an increase in organic traffic. Now that search engines will be better at matching your blog posts to the way people search, you will be able to feel ever more confident that what you’re writing will ultimately show up in the results. This is especially true when you target longer key phrases. From this point onwards, then, natural, conversational writing — not necessarily long, but lots of it — is what you should be expecting to get from any content marketing services that you commission. So, when it comes to choosing an agency, make sure they are familiar with the update and that their content marketing services can maximise the opportunities that BERT now offers online businesses. Author Plate Kit Jones is a professional consultant at LeadGeneratorsDigital, a successful online marketing agency focusing on a variety of digital strategies including content and SEO marketing. The agency provides affordable content marketing services for businesses looking to not only boost their Google rankings, but also their conversion rates and the overall quality of their site.
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