The launch of Google AI in 2017 and BERT in 2019 by the search engine major Google marks the intention of the firm to be a ‘machine learning first’ company. But how does it impact you as a business owner or a brand custodian?
According to the company, this leap can prove to be a giant step towards revolutionizing our problem-solving approach. It can span from healthcare to advanced scientific research and discovery. Thus encompassing everything between and you can have an impact of the same.
We are already seeing the impact of machine learning on search engine algorithms. Google’s aim to better match the results on the search engine result pages or SERP with the user search intent is driving its evolution.
Detecting Patterns for Content Identification
The use of machine learning mechanisms by search engines to detect the quality of the content is on the rise. They are helping to identify duplicate or spam content.
Based on the observations, contents deemed to be of low quality can have definite resemblances. These can include but are not limited to:
- Higher usage of synonyms or stop words
- The abundance of outbound links directing to unassociated pages
- Higher recurrence of spammy keywords
The ML or machine learning algorithms can identify and flag off such patterns. Another aspect, worth mentioning about ML, is they also utilize the user interaction data for the identification, and marking of new spam techniques. They successfully flag these off by acknowledging the new patterns too.
Though there are manual interventions in play at Google, using ML can help reduce the manpower requirements. It also enables automatic detection of low-quality content without any human involvement.
As a business owner or a brand custodian, you can take care of the above knockers. These can potentially rid you of the benefits that your SEO efforts can generate. A good practice can also be to seek help from the professional SEO Outsource agencies in the market.
These agencies can help you put a strong foot forward by tackling the above concerns relating to low-quality content by –
- Helping to produce high quality hand-written and not computer-generated copy
- Compelling Google to recognize the business as locally relevant by a string of suitable link-building exercises
- Increasing local citations with the use of relevant keywords in the targeted geography
Detecting New Ranking Signals
The identification of the patterns in the queries, and the new ranking signals, is especially aided by Google’s RankBrain. Before the use of this machine learning tool, the coding of algorithms took place through manual inputs.
Although system engineers are working to aid the algorithm, RankBrain can work in the background. Such an action can carry out tests for analyzing the impact of the changes on user interactions.
It also helps solve tricky areas like handling newer queries that never entered the search engine before.
Tracking the change of the query patterns and ranking signals can help you put up better content. Google’s SERP is evolving rapidly, and therefore, being vigilant is the key.
The Language Processing
For a search engine, to function better, its ability to concede the similarity between the two texts is crucial. The scope is not only limited to the words but also extends to their meaning.
Google’s BERT is the natural language processing tool that can comprehend the search intent of the user better. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
Human beings often use a similar word to mean different things, and at times they can also be premeditatively obscure. Therefore it becomes different from the machine’s expectation. Our playful intent with the language gives new phrases more often.
With increasing searches with new phrases, ML tools can come out with information more accurately. The search engine tries to come up with relevant search results that match the intent of the search queries with the help of BERT. BERT can do this by recognizing and unraveling the context-specific nuances of human intentions and understanding the user’s interaction with the content.
Google Trends is one of the best outcomes of such initiatives. You can make use of this to identify the latest trends as per the evolving user search intents.
Therefore, with the evolution of machine learning, and the development of the language processing abilities of the search engines, they can better gauge the users’ nuances. Thereby, they can help with better results.
Tapping on the inferences drawn from such tools can help you chart relevant content and overall digital strategy for your brand’s website.
