What is BERT and how does it affect you

Google has announced the most important update to their Algorithm in five years. This update is referred to as the ‘BERT update’ and it impacts 10% of all search queries. Below is a break down of what BERT is and how it will affect a website.

What is BERT?

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers also known as ‘BERT’ is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. This is simply a natural language processing pre-training approach that can be used on a large body of text. BERT handles tasks such as recognition, part of speech tagging, and question-answering among other natural language processes. It specifically helps Google understand natural language text from the Web.

Is BERT a language model? 

In some sense you can say that it is a language model. BERT is still a new concept that was made public in 2018 by researchers at Google Artificial Intelligence Language. They mention that unlike recent language representation models, this new algorithm is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabelled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers.

So the BERT model can be tuned with just one additional output layer to create advanced models for a wide range of tasks. This includes question answering and language inference without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.

What is Google BERT targeting?

It has been said by Google that the BERT update will affect 10% of all queries. That is a pretty huge percentage, but it may not have caused that much of a visible splash by SEO community standards. This is because the update focuses on the longer and more conversational queries and traditionally SEOers don’t prioritise long tail keywords.

Does BERT affect content marketing?

It does affect content marketing, Google say that content is more important and you should focus on writing content relevant for the user. BERT update will improve the understanding of search queries, so it’s clear that content marketing needs to take a leap and fulfil this big step forward Google’s Algorithm. 

Do you need to worry about the Bert update?

There are no actions you can take to mitigate it. So we recommend on continuing to focus your content strategy along the below:

• Creating content that for relevant information and answering questions relevant to your business.
• Ensuring a potential customer or user doesn’t need to go to another source to find information on your services or product.

Still not sure about the BERT update and how it will affect you? Contact Digital Carrera to talk to us about your content marketing/SEO strategy.