Categories
Keyword match types are the parameters that you can set on keywords. They help control what search phrases trigger your advertisements to show up on a search engine results page (SERP). Using various match types can remove redundant function terms and search words that might seem related to your keyword but aren’t conversion-ready users. By now, you’re likely able to see how vital exact keyword match type management can be for your campaign.
Before the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm was released, Google primarily showed results based on keywords, and keywords found on websites as a search result. However, this algorithm wasn’t practical as the content creators focused more on including keywords than providing meaningful content.
Now, the BERT algorithm ranks searches based on the interrelation between the keywords added. That’s why it’s called ‘Bidirectional’ as it interrelates every keyword with the former and latter keywords.
This article will look at how the Google BERT update impacts the exact keyword match from search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) perspective.
Selecting a PPC keyword match type is a critical aspect to consider when planning your keyword selection. As an expert advertiser, you can take advantage of every match type’s various benefits to enhance your campaigns’ effectiveness.
This way, you can eliminate similar keywords that are unrelated to your advertisements. Removing these irrelevant matches will help save your budget so that you can dedicate your ad spend on more return on investment (ROI)-focused users for better conversion rates.
Of all keyword match types, the exact keyword match has the most restrictions. Your precise match keyword will only display your ad in Google if it’s identical to your keyword or shares close variants with similar meaning. These terms provide you with maximum control for your advertisements and where they appear.
When Google Ads initiated, the platform matched search queries with exact match keywords. The search terms replicated the keywords. For example, Google would only display the ad for the keyword [women jeans] to users entering “women jeans” into the search engine. Although this provided marketers great control over their keywords, they had to carefully track their search reports and manually include each of the close variations.
Therefore, Google expanded the exact match with close variants (such as misspellings, singular forms, plural forms, acronyms, stemming, abbreviations, and accents). This change enabled marketers to reduce their close variants list for their ad groups. However, it cut down some of the control over which advertisements showed up for a particular search query.
Many marketers weren’t pleased with these changes. That’s because the exact match type lost some of its effectiveness with all the variations. Nonetheless, it still provides you with maximum control over your keywords from all match types, and you can attract high-quality clicks and point clickers to the correct place.
BERT is a machine learning algorithm that analyzes queries from different angles, such as search details, search location, and the searcher’s intent. Ultimately, multiple queries produce a ranking.
Google announced that it doesn’t intend to reduce the significance of exact match keywords by launching BERT and other algorithms. The real objective of these algorithms is to provide useful answers to the search queries. However, it doesn’t imply that the exact match keywords have become less significant.
It is perhaps the best practice to create content relevant to the topic and is easy to understand. Therefore, if utilizing a keyword is significant to understanding the content’s context, it makes sense to continue using it.
Previously, if a misspelled keyword had a high search volume, marketers or search engine experts used to include that keyword in the same way even though it was grammatically incorrect. But now, after BERT, misspelled words no longer go by unnoticed. You can only write what you want to, targeting user intent. BERT will then be responsible for displaying the desired result to the searcher.
BERT is renowned as Google’s algorithm or framework to comprehend the searcher’s intent, context, and terms used in the query. It enables the search engine to produce better search results.
Published in October 2018, BERT was also the open-source research and academic project initiated by Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. You’ll find plenty of research carried out on BERT by experts other than Google. However, Google decided to open-source BERT as a natural language processing (NLP) framework that altered it for good.
BERT takes an entirely different methodology of learning. Essentially, Google provides BERT with billions of sentences at the time of training. It ten forecasts a random set of missing words from these sentences. After practicing over with this set of words multiple times, BERT implements a better comprehension of how a sentence fits together grammatically. It is also great at forecasting ideas that are possible to appear together. That’s how this algorithm excels at handling homonyms, like “Bandh,” which can mean both “a musical group” and “a ring.”
BERT’s comprehension of human language nuances can make a big difference in how Google interprets queries as searchers are looking for obviously more extended questions.
BERT has influenced organic search results. In search engine marketing (SEM), the ad formats, keyword bidding formats, and match types remain the same. However, BERT impacts overall performance.
The novel algorithm has become even more significant to adopt the most acceptable practices and approaches. If PPC ads can cater to the intent, searchers will find them engaging via organic search results.
Previously, Google used to consider specific keywords in the query and overlooked other words such as the prepositions. However, they have understood that all the terms are required together to understand the user intent correctly. Paid searches have to align themselves clearly with searcher intent or may face the consequences of BERT.
The insight that searcher intent is a priority shouldn’t end with tweaking the ad content. The intent-based approach should be included in campaigns, budgets, objectives, and metrics in each phase. Although it is challenging to adopt this strategy at every intent stage initially, it could begin with a future growth plan.
Through automation, you should consider dynamic ad solutions and search query reports. To understand how Google interprets context, evaluate long-tail, non-product, and non-brand queries, and match it with the keywords. Long-tail queries have demonstrated an increment in impressions and clicks.
It’d be useful to search words that are newly identified and make new ad groups in line with the searcher intent. BERT aims to provide an improved context and user experience. If you wish to understand how BERT influences your advertisement, monitor keywords, and search terms analysis in your campaign.
BERT is one of Google’s most important web search updates in recent years. It uses NLP to better comprehend the context of user queries by considering factors like linking words (and, the, from) or interrogative markers (how, what, which).
Although some searchers have learned to query Google via unconnected and grammatical terms like ‘best marketing approach newbies,’ the popularization of voice search necessitates that search engines comprehend the way users naturally communicate and look beyond just search terms.
Voice search creates queries that use conversational language like “what is the best marketing approach for newbies.” This detail means they need NLP to provide the best outcomes. BERT is also capable of considering recent past searches, similar to a regular conversation. For instance, inquiring “How long does driving there take?” after asking about the nearest store’s location will give relevant results without the searcher having to mention the store again.
Understanding user intent and considering it when providing the most relevant response is eventually Google’s priority. Although keywords are still a big part of search queries, online advertisers must comprehend that depending exclusively on search terms is no longer sufficient for SEO. Backlinks and other conventional Google rankings are still significant; however, if the site doesn’t match the searcher’s intent, it will not rank highly on SERPs.
Yet, that doesn’t mean that keywords are becoming outdated. John Mueller, the Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google, stated that keywords will always be beneficial, even if they aren’t the primary focus. Displaying particular words to searchers makes it simpler for them to know what the site is about, which, in turn, delivers an improved user experience.
Eventually, optimizing user experience should be paramount in this year and later, and moving to an SEO approach to prioritize user intent is part of this practice. Concentrating more on intent research and implementing more intent-based procedures is undoubtedly something you’ll see more of this year.
After the Google BERT update, businesses are gradually shifting toward SEO strategies for voice devices. Moreover, they have started using long-tail keywords to target the broad audience to generate leads and sales through the search engine.
Adopting this strategy considers natural language as more users look for their queries via voice search, and it’s vital to capture those keywords. If you’re seeking a keyword research tool, you can use PPCexpo Keyword Planner for optimal results.
Google continues to remind webmasters to create content for the audience, not for the search engines. Typically, users focus on keyword placement, keyword density, and using relevant keywords within your content to rank higher on the SERPs.
However, if you don’t follow the ethics of writing and prefer quantity over quality, you may lose out on Google’s latest algorithm updates.
Google BERT update focuses on the context of your writing. So follow these tips when writing any piece of content:
Want to make the most use of the Google BERT update? Follow these tips:
Good content is all about focusing on your human reader, and that’s exactly what Google is advocating since the release of BERT. This algorithm empowers the search engine to understand searches performed using “natural language” instead of “keyword-ese” – the use of strings don’t resemble human speech but are designed to get Google to deliver the information you want.
If you’ve created your content for humans, you won’t have to worry about this. However, if you’re still keyword stuffing like its 2009, it’s now time to ensure your content makes sense to real users, not bots.
Expertise, authority, and trust are the three elements of Google’s quality metrics for determining your page rank. The majority of Google’s algorithm updates have centered around addressing SEO gaming in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It is no longer possible to produce plenty of poorly written but perfectly SEO-optimized blogs. Google will shove them down or even unlist the website altogether.
BERT hasn’t changed the rules of the SEO game. Now, it’s more likely that the useful, quality content you’ve written already will be even more effective in the search engine as the algorithm uses NLP.
One of the most significant adverse impacts observed with BERT is a decline in organic search traffic. This occurrence suggests that your pages were ranking in searches that weren’t relevant to your niche. BERT is designed to return more relevant results to the users.
Almost as soon as Google announced the BERT update, SEO experts started sharing advice on how BERT is altering the SEO landscape. Some of the advice included:
Avoid blindly following anyone who claims they have the ultimate BERT SEO optimization strategy. BERT doesn’t alter any rules related to SEO.
BERT is making Featured Snippets more beneficial. Introduced in 2014, these snippets provide a way to quickly browse a website’s content without actually clicking on its link.
Even if you’re not the top-ranked page in search engine results, there’s a possibility you may get featured in the coveted “position zero” if no site above yours is well-optimized.
Now, you can’t generate your featured snippets. However, you can take a few steps to improve the probability of your website appearing as a featured snippet:
Previously, exact keywords mirrored the search terms they triggered. However, later Google started solving issues with synonyms and close variations as well. As discussed earlier, Google doesn’t intentionally remove exact matches through BERT.
Therefore, you shouldn’t overlook the exact keyword match terms in your PPC campaigns as they always have high intent. You should include them in your PPC campaigns often by concentrating on searcher intent rather than BERT intent.
The new Google algorithm update has created a lot of speculation about its influence and its means for marketing and advertising. Here are a few myths you should keep in mind:
The primary purpose of BERT is to help Google understand what searchers mean when they enter search queries. This intent helps connect people with the particular solutions they want online.
As a content creator, you don’t have to use long-tail keywords. You can keep mixing short and long keywords. You should focus more on your content’s quality and context and stop worrying about your keyword length.
Although it hasn’t been long since Google introduced this update, BERT influences almost 10% of search queries all over the USA. Over time, this impact will increase, directing substantial traffic to the rightful pages.
As search engines become more sophisticated, including more intent-based models and practices into research online, advertisers should be emphasized in 2021. However, intent research models can be entirely subjective from a categorization point of view as they depend on an individual’s perspective to understand the intentions behind a list of keywords. Not only that, but the main types of search intent are quite extensive and not very actionable.
For useful intent research, advertisers need to have reliable data metrics, like click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates, to support a search word’s defined intention. This insurance helps them make related lists of purchase and research intent keywords while ensuring the keywords they utilize for a particular search intent are the most relevant to the audience.
Monitoring SERPs statistics for keyword reliability over time also gives insight on which search words are best to target for the specific type of user intent, helping to create a concrete foundation for your campaign.
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
What are search engine optimization goals? This blog explains what SEO goals are, why they're important, and how to set and analyze them effectively.
This guide shows you everything you need to know about the search engine marketing vs search engine optimization debate. You'll also discover how to track your online marketing activity.
