Search engine optimization is tricky. There a🥂re so many tactics to remember, 🉐so many strategies to experiment with, and so many metrics to track.

In today’s digital world, the c🅠ompetition is fierce, and everyone is fighting for that first spot in the SERP.

With a ton of potential optimization techniques to try, it can be hard to prioritize what to focus on. But over the years, one thing has remained constant: the need for keywords within your content. According to convention👍al thinking, it’s not enough to have♋ keywords scattered across your website — you should try to match them as closely as possible to what the user is actually searching for. 

Google calls these “exact match keywords,” and they are just what they sound like: keywords that match exactly wh🌜at the user types into the search 🅘engine query bar.

In a recent , a question was asked about whether or not the importance of exact match keywords would decrease upon the emergen༒ce of , Google’s algorithm update from 2019.

ౠGoogle’s John Mueller weighed in on the subject to explain BERT’s purpose, as well as how it might affect keyword use in the long run.

First, what is BERT?

First off, contrary to the question that was pꦑosed, BERT is not “emerging.” In fact, it was introduced in October 🧸of last year.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and according to , “it is Google’sꩲ neural network-based technique for natural language ♋processing (NLP) pre-training.”

For those of you who are like me and do not speak robot, put in simpler t🌄erms, BERT essentially hel♏ps computers comprehend language more like humans do.

It analyzes what someone types into the search bar, as well as content that might match that search, and tries its best to relevantly connect them with each other. Mueller further explains, “with mac꧑hine learning approaches, we try to understand what the pages are about and what the queries are looking for, and we try to match these better.”

The image shows an♌ illustrative example of BERT in action:

Image courtesy:

You can see that the search results in the after꧙ image more clearly match what the user was looking for.

In the before image, it looks like Google tried to match the words “medicine” and “pharmacy” to assume someone wanted to fill a prescription of medicine at a pharmacy. In the after image, the result better matches what our human brains automatically ღthink this person is searching for: picking u🥀p a prescription for someone else at a pharmacy.

So, what about those exact match keywords?

Historically, some companies focused so heavily on the exact m🅰atching technique that they keyword-stuffed their ꦅcontent with multiple versions of the keyword, including singular and plural forms, as well as common misspellings! (The grammar nerd in me is cringing.)

Can you imagine being an outdoor clothing company and purposefully writing “camoflage sw💙eatshirt” on your product page because a large number of ღpeople spell it that way? Instant loss of credibility in my book!

Well, the good news is that🃏 after clarifying BERT’s purpose, Mueller talked about how it may affect the use of keywords in the near future. He noted that we’re headed in the direction where we don’t need to have the exact match on our pages an𓆏ymore.

Mueller said this will be less critical than it might have been in the past, because the real focus should be more on answering or matching what the user is actuall🔜y looking for.

This confirms🦹 that the importance of exact keyword matching is decreasing, so no more deliberately misspelling words (yay!).

However, Mueller wanted to ensure that people clearly understand that the goal of Google’s search algorithms is not to provide users with the results that best match what they type into the search bar. Rather, the goal is to deliver the best resu✅lts to users wh♒en they ask for themꦓ. In short, Google aims to answer a user’s question with the content that provides the most value.

With that said, you should not give up on 澳洲幸运5开奖官网在线查询开奖结果:keywords as an SEO tactic altogether.

Make sure you know what your audience is searching for, and always strive to present them with the best possible answer. Now more than ever, being able to combine keyword optimization with search intent is a recipe for SEO success.