With regards to site ranking, Google announced recently that there will be profound changes in its algorithm with, of course, the intention of making search even better for the users. This also means that these changes will obviously impact how websites will be ranked in search results from now on. Thus, the publishers, digital marketing companies, and developers need to update their knowledge on how they will be able to rank their websites following the latest update.
Some of these updates may have already been live while others are coming towards the end of the year. So we all have to be on stand by. With the improvements done on Google’s algorithm, there is no guessing that it will likely add more diversity in the search results making it even more challenging for SEO.
With that being said, here’s what we think about how the new updates can affect site rankings.
Employing BERT in Every Search Query
BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers was first introduced by Google in 2019 in which it was used in 10% of its search queries. Starting in 2020, Google intends to make searches even better than ever before by employing BERT in every search query. This is one of the biggest reveals that the company dropped along with its other updates.
BERT is a language understanding system that helps Google understand words within the context of the surrounding keywords. Google revealed that through BERT, which is now used in almost every query in English, Google Search will have a better understanding of the intent of the query, thus, improving the quality of its search results.
Better Spelling Generator
An improved spelling algorithm is one of the latest updates made by Google and it’s said to be the biggest improvement they did in spelling algorithms in the last five years.
What makes this update interesting is that it helps Google understand better the context of misspelled words, thus, whether you missed out on some letters or jumbled the spelling, Google has that capacity to know what you are searching for. This update is definitely helpful for faster, more relevant, and high-quality search results.
Indexing Passages in a Web Page
Making sure that your site gets crawled and indexed is a requirement for your site to show up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Before the update, it is only the web page itself that is visibly indexed. On the recent update, individual passages from a web page are now being indexed by Google which is important in the site ranking in SERPs. It is also said that this new indexing algorithm will impact the search query by 7%. A visual representation of this would be when you type in your query, Google will show the passage within the site content that contains your query.
This is definitely an important update that can visibly impact Google’s SERPs. Knowing this new indexing update, website owners should be able to take more action on their SEO, especially on the content marketing efforts to make their content more relevant to queries and successfully rank on the SERPs.
Subtopics for Broad Search Queries
According to Google, neural nets are now being applied to understand subtopics around a certain subject which will help deliver a much diverse set of content for searches with broad topics. Exampled by Google, if you type in “home exercise equipment” in search, it will present you with some relevant subtopics such as small space ideas, home exercises, home equipment, and more to show a wider range of content on SERPs. This will start to roll out by the end of 2020.
This only means that if you have a broad topic, you may need to work on your SEO and make sure your subtopic pages are optimized to secure a spot on the search engine result pages.
How do these updates impact the websites?
With some of the latest updates already implemented in the system, we can now somehow see how these changes are going to affect the fate of the sites on the web. Since BERT is targeting the informational related keywords in search, publishers will now have to be more specific as ever when working around their topic of interest. This means that there’s going to be more work for SEO.
Typically, the easiest way to rank keywords is through content. SEOs will tell you to make it long as far as content is concerned. But with Google’s algorithm, the focus isn’t on the length of the content or the word count, but rather on the quality of the content. Focus on long-tail keywords and create content that answers the searcher queries as direct as possible and better than your competitors.
Google updates its search ranking algorithm now and then, so digital marketers need to be in the loop of what’s new. What the updates tell us every time is that they can be a make or break for websites in the search results. Knowing the latest trends and updates from Google will give you the heads up on what should be changed or improved on the quality of your websites in order for it to rank.
In a nutshell, your role is to keep up with the rules of the SERPs if you want to rank and have more traffic. Because, in search rankings, it is not the publishers that make the rules, it is Google. Simple as that.
