1. NLP for SEOs: How to
optimise your
content for BERT
@jcbhaagen
Josephine Haagen
Journey Further
https://www.slideshare.net/
JosephineHaagen

2. 2
What is
NLP?
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3. How machines
understand language.
3
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4. 4
Or, in SEO terms:
Takes unstructured data
and attempts to
structure it.
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5
What can NLP
do for you?

6. 6
A content strategy led by NLP
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7. 7
A content strategy led by NLP
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8
What did we
do?

9. 9
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01
Prioritised key
pages based on
potential traffic

10. 10
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02
Optimised them
(based on
prioritised
order)

11. 11
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03
Watched the
line go up

12. 12
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How does
NLP
work?

13. 13
Processing
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INPUT TOKENISATION

14. 14
Processing
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TOKENISATION
POS TAG
SALIENCE
STEMS
DEPENDENCY

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NLP in action
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16. 16
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17. 17
What do we know about Alice?
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Alice is swimming against the current.
Noun (aux) V Verb Preposition Determiner Noun
Parsed by Google’s NLP tool
Parsed manually

18. 18
BERT
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19
BERT
NLU icon
Token masking
Next sentence
prediction

20. 20
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“In autumn the ______
fall from the trees.”

21. 21
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At dinner, Ernie
ordered a pizza
and tiramisu.
Do we still call
it link juice?
After a long
day of work,
Ernie went out
to dinner with
friends.
IsNext
NotNext

22. 22
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How to optimise
content with
NLP

23. 23
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“First-time
buyer”
Adjective (first-time)
supporting a noun
(buyer)
Maximum
three word
phrase
Noun is not also
an adjective
No numbers in
the keyword

24. 24
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25. 25
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In the rugged Colorado Desert of
California, there lies buried a treasure
ship sailed there hundreds of years
ago by either Viking or Spanish
explorers. Some say this is legend;
others insist it is fact. A few have
even claimed to have seen the ship,
its wooden remains poking through
the sand like the skeleton of a
prehistoric beast. Among those who
say they’ve come close to the ship is
small-town librarian Myrtle Botts. In
1933, she was hiking with her
husband in the Anza-Borrego Desert,
not far from the border with Mexico.
Text Relevance
rugged
Colorado
Desert of
California
0.89
treasure ship 0.78
Anza-
Borrego
Desert
0.75
Spanish
explorers
0.6

26. 26
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Villas in Spain are incredibly popular, and
for good reason too! With beautiful
beaches and a charming countryside,
bustling cities and idyllic towns, a
Spanish villa holiday will
certainly be one to remember.

27. 27
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Topic Original Updated Difference
holiday
villas
0.00 0.58 0.58
Spanish
villa
properties
0.64 0.69 0.05
In Salient, salience is measured as a
score out of 1.

28. 28
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Changes go through

29. 29
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Introduce
focus
keywords
in the first
paragraph
Experiment
with
sentence
structure
Look at
what the
tool sees
as
relevant
Do

30. 30
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Don’t
Keyword
stuff
Write for
robots

31. 31
So why
use NLP?
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32. 32
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01
Because
you can
02
Because
Google is
03
Because
it works!

33. Thank
you
33

34. 34
Appendix
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35. 35
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Tools mentioned:
SALIENT
Google’s natural language API demo
Understanding BERT:
● Open Sourcing BERT: State-of-the-Art Pre-training for Natural Language
Processing
● BERT Explained: State of the art language model for NLP
● What’s My Line? Next Sentence Prediction in RunwayML with BERT
● BERT For Next Sentence Prediction

36. 36
Syntax & Semantics
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Syntax is the grammatical structure of a
sentence, the order each word goes into.
Semantics is the intent part of a sentence, how
do the words in the sentence affect each other?
How does the order in which they come in
change your meaning?
NLP turns syntax and semantics into its own
data structure which specifies the relationship
between words and phrases. This is known as
ontology.
NLU takes this ontology and attempts to
prescribe intent to it.
“Patient’s mother was involved in a car accident
and injured her hand.”

37. 37
Parts of speech
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Nouns - keywords are usually nouns. Nouns are
things.
Verbs - doing words
Adjectives - describing words
Superlatives - adjectives on a scale. Best,
worst, greatest, biggest, smallest.
Adverbs - describes a word. Quickly, slowly,
really, very.
Prepositions - Links a noun to another noun.
To, at, after, on.
Conjunctions - Joins clauses, sentences, or
words together. And, but, when.

38. 38
Sentence structures/syntax
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Independent clause - a part of a sentence that
could stand alone. A subject, a verb, and a
complete idea.
I like SEO.
He is optimising a page.
Dependent clause - Not a complete sentence.
Sits with an independent clause to become a
complete sentence.
Because she said that,
As I’m currently looking into this,
Subject - Whatever’s doing the action in your
sentence.
I like SEO.
Verb - the action in your sentence.
I like SEO.
Object - What receives the action in
a sentence.
I like SEO.
Prepositional phrase - A phrase
that begins with a preposition, and
modifies a word in the sentence.
I like SEO on smaller websites.

39. 39
Types of sentences
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Simple sentences - a sentence that could stand
alone. A subject, a verb, and a complete idea.
I like SEO.
He is optimising a page.
Compound sentences - A sentence that
contains two or more independent clauses, they
can be combined with a comma, a conjunction,
or with a semicolon.
I like SEO, I’m good at it.
I like SEO, but I’m no good at it.
Complex sentences - an independent
clause and one dependent clause (a
part of a sentence that can’t stand on
its own).
Although I like SEO, I don’t like site
speed.
Compound-complex sentences - a
sentence that has at least two
independent clauses and at least one
dependent clause. These can be
joined via commas or conjunctions,
though they can get confusing if your
comma game isn’t strong.
I like SEO, even though I spent
hours trying to edit a robots.txt, and
my laptop crashed trying to run a
crawl.