Google's BERT Update is the biggest change to Search in the past five years. Here's why it happened, what it means for your content strategy and what we recommend.

1. BERT Update
2019
What to know and what to do

2. 2
Bidirectional Encoder
Representations from Transformers
What is BERT?
BERT helps Google understand complex or
conversational queries.
Instead of analyzing how one word relates
to the word after or before it, BERT picks up
on how words in a sequence relate to the
rest of the words in a sequence.

3. 3
Why did BERT happen?
15% of queries are unique –
which means Google
doesn’t know how to
process them.
BERT is one (large) step
in Google’s effort to
understand how real
people speak.
Ultimately, this will help
SERPs give people
the most relevant
information available.
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4. 4
BERT’s impact
10% of queries will be affected.
Affected queries are more likely to
be longer strings of words rather
than short-tail keywords.

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How to optimize for BERT
Good news: You already are if
you’re writing for your audience first.
Keep writing engaging and
informative content for real humans.

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