Optimising for BERT

This week there was a major update to the way Google serve results but the SEO community have been relatively chilled about it as there has been no real casualties from the update despite it affecting 10% of queries.

Here is this weeks Google Slide deck with all the news as well as some short tutorials. Share it with your team to keep them up to date with the algorithm changes and SERP movements every week.

You can tell BERT is a big deal for Google as it made it’s way to “normal people” news with publications like Techcrunch covering the story.

BERT uses natural language processing and machine learning to serve better answers to more nuanced queries.

And because it uses NLP and ML you CAN’T really optimise for it. However, you can use Google’s own NLP API to analyse your own content and build it into your content creation work flow.

Here is a Google Sheet I made that uses NLP API to analyse text and compare it to search console data. Just go to Tools > Scripts to and add your API key. Here is the companion SEMrush weekly wisdom video to show you how it works.

Screaming Frog also had an update that the speed demons are going to love as you can now do lighthouse speed audits at scale and filter through by issue. My other personal favourite is the ability to do 100 custom extractions at once. Scrape all the things!

This week I was hosting the London leg of the #GlobalMarketingDay with SEMrush. You can access the full 24 hour steam (it’s a beast) on the official site.

For London SEOs the next Take it Offline event is happening on the 6th of November with the title SEO & Digital Disaster Therapy which is going to be a roundtable event where we are going to trouble shoot any issues people are having. Full details and tickets here.

This week we have been pitching our little faces off as more people contact us with their left over Q4 budgets that haven’t yet been spent.

As we are now growing a little bit too big for an all hands standup every morning we’ve updated the agency structure into account teams and removed the concept of departments.

Splitting agency resources into client teams means we can keep growing without affecting the quality of output for our current client base. As the account teams start to work independently of one another, we create ‘mini agencies’ inside Type A should lead to more innovation as they start competing and sharing insights from their accounts.

I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite so I could start to read more books instead of mindlessly scrolling through social feeds. So far I am loving it.

I “share to Kindle” on all my devices so I can save blog posts and Google patents and read them like a morning paper on the Kindle.

This week I’ve read:

The Dunning Kruger Effect

I heard a great podcast too:

A great management and leadership podcast with Tim Ferris and Ben Horowitz