What Rank Brain does when you search for a keyword?

To understand RankBrain clearly, you may want to try to see things from Google’s perspective, for example, how the search engine’s algorithm interprets a query like “Olympics location.”

How does this search benefit the organization? Do you mean the Summer Olympics or the Winter Olympics? Do they refer to the most recent Olympics or the one that will take place in four years? What is the searcher’s situation today, are they currently at the Olympics, staying in a hotel, and trying to find directions to the venues for the opening ceremony? Maybe they’re searching for information about Ancient Greece’s very first Olympics?

Now think of a scenario where the only signals used to determine which results to rank were simple algorithms such as the quality of a piece of content or its links. As an example, the Winter Olympics that ended in Sochi, Russia last month had millions of links pointing to the official website for this event. If your algorithm relies on simple links, it might only show search results about the Sochi Games, whereas the searcher may want to learn about Pyeongchang, South Korea, where the 2016 Winter Olympics will take place.

This is where Rank Brain’s usefulness emerges as one of its greatest advantages. Google can only predict search results by mathematically calculating them based on patterns the machine learning algorithm has observed in searcher behavior, for instance, most people searching for “Olympics location” want to know where the next Winter Games (or Summer Games) will take place. The majority of searchers will benefit from a Google answer box featuring the upcoming Games’ location.

There are several notable exceptions to that answer box that must be addressed if Google is to address the intent behind most “Olympics location” searches. During the week of the Olympics, for instance, Google may instead provide driving directions to the opening ceremony pavilion if the searching user is located within an Olympic city (such as Pyeongchang). To interpret intent and deliver results that most likely satisfy searchers, signals like geolocation and freshness should be considered.

The Benefits of Rank Brain

The improvements brought by Rankbrain are likely to include:

1. Increased tolerance for long-tail keywords – Users seeking unusual or complex results are likely to find them more quickly (without having to run several queries consecutively).
2. I expect that Rankbrain can assist with voice searches in a better way – as a result, technologies like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana should produce better results.

Google has confirmed using almost 200 factors or signals to determine the relevance of a search result. According to 200 signals, RankBrain ranks third. The search giant estimates that around 3 billion queries are performed every day, out of which 15% are new. RankBrain actively assists in handling these.

According to January’s SERPs (right screenshot), it appears Rank’s brain defined the word ‘weak’ as belonging to security encryption and accordingly returned results. An engineering team scored 70% while Rankbrain scored 80%, in a test which can be used to determine the relevance of content. Its engineers were beaten by Rank Brain!’

Rankbrain and Hummingbird

Profiling users enables Google RankBrain to build an extensive knowledge base. Using Hummingbird’s semantic search, the engine analyzes user queries and then sorts the results based on the meaning and intent, to deliver the most relevant information.

The Impact of Google RankBrain on SEO

As compared to other algorithms, RankBrain has proven to be effective. By far, its greatest achievement has been its ability to read and understand what is most relevant and helpful to the user. Exactly that is where search engine optimization strategies should focus now.

Today, it is crucial to make SEO value-centric and audience-centric. Your content should be considered from the perspective of your users. The winning formula is to provide your users with the content that they interact with the most and provide value that they find useful. So simple.

Rankbrain vs. BERT

In October of 2019, BERT was the next major Google update after RankBrain.

A neural network-based linguistic preprogramming technique developed by Google, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) uses linguistic representations generated by a neural network. Several programs are available that help to optimize search results according to user intent, including Rankbrain and BERT. To understand search queries, Rankbrain uses both users’ queries and pages’ information, guessing by looking for similar queries that have done well in the past. When this happens, the resulting page might not contain the precise phrase that the user searched for.

BERT Assists Google in Understanding Natural Language: There is more nuance in a longer text, conversational queries, and nuances in word associations. Rankbrain and BERT are complementary algorithms that may be used separately or in combination to interpret query phrases as effectively as possible.

How to Optimize for RankBrain?

The following tips will help you optimize your content for RankBrain.

Use Natural Language

When creating content, keep your tone natural. While creating your content, do you want it to sound like it would be spoken by a human? Conversational or not? Writing in this style can greatly increase the chances of RankBrain understanding your content.

Strengthen Relevance

Creating content for keywords should match their intent. The right content will depend on your understanding of how the keyword will be used. Make sure each page is as comprehensive as possible by considering several topics instead of just one keyword.

There may have been times when we wrote several posts about each topic so each could be optimized for a particular keyword. Trying to rank for multiple terms and keywords is now the objective for merging those posts into one. You will rank for more keywords if you create an article that covers all the possible variations of a topic. That will help to boost the authority of the post.

Search Intent

Identify the top results for your keyword and examine them. Considering the way people interact with the results, Google recognizes that the pages ranked on these results are the kind of content a searcher would seek out.

Quality Over Quantity

If you have been active in SEO for any length of time, you need to change the way you view content and keyword strategy.

Improve Click-through Rate (CTR)

A good title tag and meta description are critical to getting the most clicks from the search results, as RankBrain does consider click-through data.

Your title should use emotion as much as possible to increase click-throughs. Your title can also be made more unique by using numbers, brackets, or parentheses. Check out the paid ads in your niche, as well as the pages that rank high for inspiration.

Conversational Writing

Are you aware of what types of content average users find most engaging? Written with a human tone that is clever, occasionally humorous, and contains a touch of humor (not dry).

Engage users and keep them on your page by creating engaging content. Users might even reply (via comments) to your content when you speak to them. Engage your audience with your content.

Impact on Digital Marketing

Through RankBrain, Google can perform a greater amount of algorithmic testing on keyword categories to determine the best content to match each query. Old gaming tactics are decreasing in effectiveness as false signals become less effective, and Google is beginning to more effectively rank human-oriented content higher.

Due to its ability to learn unfamiliar words and phrases, RankBrain has helped Hummingbird to provide more accurate results. Additionally, it learns them for the country a query is made in, as well as the language. The United States is a country where searching for footwear will return information on boots. In the case of a UK query, however, traffic could also be coming from inquiries about car storage.

The RankBrain algorithm is one of the key factors that is now dictating the SEO game and will remain in the game. Even though SEO has changed, it still has a lot of value. A revolutionary aspect of Google’s business model is its role in helping consumers find the most relevant and helpful content.

As Google’s ranking algorithm, RankBrain is aligned with that role and ensures that users can find the content most relevant to their needs and search queries. Google RankBrain is here and players need to change their SEO strategies to take advantage of it.