One of Google’s most recent algorithm updates, called BERT, is a pretty big deal.
Google said BERT “represents the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”
But what exactly is BERT, and what changes do you need to make to respond to it so that your site doesn’t lose search engine traffic?
We’re going to discuss all of that today and give you the information you need to know.
What is BERT?
The acronym “BERT” stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. But you don’t really need to remember that, and probably won’t because it’s so long!
What you do need to remember about BERT is that it changes the way that search engines interpret search queries.
According to WordStream:
BERT is a system by which Google’s algorithm uses pattern recognition to better understand how human beings communicate so that it can return more relevant results for users.
Simply put, BERT helps Google better understand words in the context of searches so that it can return more relevant results. It also helps Google understand the subtleties of human speech and language so that it can interpret things like voice searches more accurately.
Here’s a quick example of how BERT helps improve search engine results.
Before BERT, if you searched “2019 brazil traveler to usa need visa,” you’d get results about US citizens traveling to Brazil.
But now, Google understands the importance of the connecting words in this search query, like “to” and “need,” and can produce more accurate results about Brazilians traveling to the US.
This update makes finding the information you need online a whole lot easier, so it’s ultimately a good thing for everyone.
But whenever Google makes a monumental update like this, it always affects search traffic.
If you noticed a dip in traffic to your website when Google started rolling BERT out this October, then you’re probably wondering what you can do to recover.
What changes do you need to make to respond to this update?
Unfortunately, there’s no real way to recover the search traffic that you’ve lost to your existing content as a result of this update.
If you’ve experienced a dip in traffic because of BERT, it probably means you were getting traffic for search terms that you weren’t supposed to.
The good news is that losing some of that traffic isn’t bad for your website or business.
The people who came across your website because of poor search results probably left as soon as they realized your content didn’t answer their questions.
Now the people who come across your content are more likely to find it helpful, so they’ll stay on your page for longer periods of time and may even enter your sales funnel.
One way you can respond to BERT, though, is to keep producing high-quality content with relevant keywords that will draw people to your page from search engines.
As long as you regularly update your blog with helpful, insightful posts that provide real value for your readers, you’ll be able to recover from this period of lower traffic.