In this brief I want to explain the intelligence behind the google capabilities to read and understand human language. Yes, they want to make their search engines to think as humans. And that’s a lot harder as one can imagine.
Google, just as other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Facebook or Linkedin use natural language understanding. Languages are dynamic, tricky and challenging. Words and sentences can be ambiguous, polysemous. Synonyms, homophones (words that sound the same) or prosody (intonations) are used. All difficult words to explain that we use different words, ways, manners and tones to explain something. We can be sarcastic. We can inflict pain without the explicit use of racial words. We use words that can have different meanings. So, for a machine to understand all this challenges require some very smart algorithms.
The new natural language interpretations from Google BERT use a lot of contextual learning; meaning it tries to understand the context, distils the essence (keywords) and understand the context. More, it can add a level of probability and even predictability through smart multi-layer grammatical or lexicon linking.
A long story short, Google BERT’s (released late October 2019) has reached a high level of intelligence. When you request information it can far more precisely respond to the information (or with ads 😊) you need.
Why all this matters? Well, as a company you need to get find. 90% of commerce starts with a search on the internet these days. You, as a company, really want to be high on the list of answers (e.g. SERP, Google Rankings) because almost 80% of people click on only the top 7 responses. That’s why companies are changing their strategies fast and are putting SEO and content management as a priority. Traditional marketing is out, the new digital marketing take the lead.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a very specialised discipline in the digital marketing area. It’s much more than then just adding keywords on your website or blogs. But search engines want that SEO is part of valuable information. The new algorithms even punish those that provide little content. Google, for instance, understands that people are tired by aggressive ads and generic content. People too become hesitant to provide all their details to download some material which bring little or no value.
What a SME (Small and Medium company) can do with little budget? Here’s the things that work well, for the search engines and your target groups; Share relevant or topical information though visual storytelling, expert or technical guidance in the form of webinars, infographics, video tutorials, pictures. For instance, a few customer experience video’s is both rewarded by search engines but also by your target audience as they are likely to watch them. Search engines want that people watch your videos for longer than 20 seconds. Search engines want that people visit your website and stay there for longer than 10 seconds. Preferably click several links whilst on your website. Search engines want you to have backlinks to other sites with authority (they have to endorse you as well with a backlink to your side). Search engines like to see you contributing on a regular pace to your audience. So, websites with outdates post are punished too.
Search engines also like a structured index, keyword metadata, followers, and lots of small requirements that an SEO expert is likely to get done in 1 or 2 days work.
The good thing is that Search Engines are now much better in linking you with your target audience in a smaller regional scope. That’s brilliant for many SMEs as their target audience in often nearby. It makes your campaigns more efficient.
Conclusions: most SMEs don’t have the time or the resources to play to the rules of the search engines. So start by finding and sharing all the existing information that you have (after updating). Get en SEO expert to scan and fulfil all search engine requirements. Hire part-time a good digital marketeer that can give you content, mobilise your social networks and can reach your target audience through low-cost but crafty campaigns.
It works, trust us. And reasonable fast results are most likely. After all, it’s about getting more customers, isn’t it?
Bart Peeters, Spoednik.be
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