How Google's New Changes Will Affect Your Website

You may not have noticed it yet but Google has recently been rolling out an algorithm update called BERT.

The reason you should care about BERT is that Google has said that it will affect 1 in 10 Google search enquiries. That means there's a good chance that it will affect your website.

BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers which in simple language means that Google has adjusted their algorithm to understand natural language queries better in order to give users more relevant results when doing a Google search.

Google will now take into account prepositions within a search query. Words such as As, At, For, and To can add meaning and context to a search term. These small words that are used before and after the main keywords often provide the true intent behind the search.  

The new Google updates also mean improved relevance for featured snippets results. Snippets are displayed usually in boxes at the top of the Google search results, with the aim of answering questions immediately. Snippets can also include images and text showing relevant information on the page.

Essentially what all this means is that you should be optimising your content for humans not for Google. Don't get hung up on technical details such as keyword density, just focus on writing quality content over quantity. When you do this, keywords will fall into place naturally. 

Why your website content matters even more after Google's latest change

Because of these new changes, it's important to create very specific content. Have a separate page for each service you provide and create thorough content that tells the reader as much helpful and useful information about that service as possible. A good tip is to include answers to your most commonly asked questions. 

One of the biggest opportunities for local businesses is to create regular highly specific content around a topic. Blog posts are a perfect way to do this. The better the written content is on your website, the better your chances will be of getting found on Google for longer search queries that relate to your business. 

At Bloomtools we have a professional in-house content writer. We can create blog posts for you and/or update your website content. Contact your Internet Consultant to find out how we can further assist you and your business.