You Ask, I Answer: Testing for BERT?

In today's episode, Mitch asks, Danny Sullivan over at Google says there's nothing to optimize for BERT, uh, nor for anyone anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of uh seeking to reward great content remain unchanged. And Mitch's question is anyone else actually testing for Bert. Uh Danny is fundamentally correct. If you've always been creating great uh content that is uh useful or helpful or entertaining, uh that people like, that answers the searchers' question, and that meets Google's uh EAT guidelines, expertise, authority, and trust, then yeah, literally nothing changes.

You've been creating great content, you will continue to create create great content, and Google will continue to funnel people to your website. That doesn't change. The challenge for a lot of marketers is they're they're not, right? A lot of marketing content isn't very expertly written, isn't high authority, um, and isn't trustworthy. And so uh this the algorithms and things that are are being used will push people away from your content because it's not as good as what else is out there.

That's that has been the case for every single one of Google's uh algorithm changes over the years, and the fact that you know they're constantly tuning in real time. There's just not a place in if you are a marketer who wants to have high performing content and attract a lot of search traffic, there is no place for mediocre content. And there certainly is no place for bad content. When you read Google's search quality rating guidelines, one of the phrases that really sticks out and has stuck out for me uh ever since I read it, is there's an entire category of stuff that's not going to rank well that says nothing wrong but nothing special. Okay.

Nothing wrong but nothing special is a death sentence to your content. Period. It doesn't matter what era of Google algorithm we're talking about, it means your stuff's not great. So the other aspect of this is that there have been a lot of marketers and a lot of search firms too that use they call scalability tricks. They can scale to any industry.

And what they do fundamentally is just hire the cheapest outsourced content farms or guest authors or have the interns crank out swill or uh at worst copy paste paragraphs from you know different sources around the web to put together uh high volume content that's low quality. Anytime you're dealing with a natural language processing algorithm, especially uh a deep neural network model like BERT or XLNET or GPT2 or Elmo or Glove or whatever, the ones that can see beyond the sentence, a word to phrase to sentence to paragraph to document, right? I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Google's ability to use these algorithms extends beyond the sentence level to the document level. In fact, I believe if I'm not mistaken, Bill Slosky over at SEO by the C has explored some of Google's patents on this topic. All of those cheap tricks that people use just to crank out content that's low quality break more in when you start using more advanced neural and natural language processing uh algorithms.

The more advanced the algorithm, the more those tricks break because the easier they are to see through. You can see this was not written by an expert, or this was written hastily, or this was copy pasted together, or this was written by somebody for whom this is not even their first language, and so they don't speak natively, and there at leaves telltale traces in the content that, yeah, this is not this does not look or sound like authoritative content um written by an expert with deep subject matter knowledge on the the question being asked of it. And you don't need a ton of content to be able to reflect that, right? You don't need to write 10,000 words to reflect that. There will be words and phrases and prepositions and st and grammatical structures that indicate you know what you're talking about very, very quickly in your writing.

Like compare what uh your 21-year-old intern is going to write about the topic of, say, um, cardiac uh devices, versus what your chief surgeon's gonna write. Say, hey, I need two paragraphs from each of you on uh the latest trends in in cardiac devices. You're gonna get fundamentally very different language, even in 300, 400, 500 words, right? That's about two minutes of somebody speaking. Ask your intern to speak for two minutes about cardiac devices, ask your chief surgeon to speak.

You're gonna get really different content out of their mouths. So BERT changes the game for low performing marketers because what it does is effectively it makes the great stay great, but it makes the mediocre really become worse, right? In terms of search performance. It also changes the game for a lot of low performing marketers because it's harder to game, right? When you have algorithms that can do reading at the sentence paragraph and document level, it is harder to just, you know, add in a couple more keywords.

Hey, put there's some more keywords in there. In the old days, you know, the old joke, an ACO expert walks into a bar, tavern, pub, and so on and so forth. Those jokes existed for a reason because that's what you needed to do. That breaks down when you're looking at the document level. That breaks down when you're looking at the paragraph level.

If it doesn't read the way the authorities in the space write, it will not do well. It's harder to game. So Danny is 100% correct. Nothing to optimize for Bert. Um if your stuff is great.

If your stuff is not great, there's a lot to optimize for. There's a lot to improve. Uh and to Mitch's question, is anyone testing? Yes, we did some testing yesterday on a page that had lost over 2,000 visits uh this year from organic search. I ran the process outlined in a post over Trust Insights.

I'll put a link below if you want to read the 10-step process for this type of optimization. And what we found was that there were some key topics, some points that were not in the page that were in the competing pages, um, topics that made logical sense but just weren't in the original piece. Maybe for clarity, maybe for uh narrative flow, whatever the case may be, what was in everything that ranked well was not in this target piece. So we made some changes. Now we wait to see what's happening.

Now we wait to see how it goes. Um I'm running some tests of my own. Uh the transcription software that I use has continued to improve. I just did an A B test with a year over year uh transcript. And what is coming out now reads much more naturally than the way it was transcribing a year ago.

I use otter uh otter.ai. And so for me, I have some work to do to go back and and clean up older transcripts, reoptimize them to sound more natural. So those are some things to think about. Again, Danny's right great content doesn't need to change. But if your content's not great, it needs to change a lot.

And for most marketers, that's a very, very, very long road to haul. So uh great question. Important question. There's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to watch in this space and you should absolutely be playing with all these natural language processing tools so that you can better understand how they work and apply your learnings to your content.

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