A.I. Meets SEO: Google’s RankBrain Changes Search Again

 

A.I, or Artificial Intelligence, may still seem like science fiction to you, but it is actually being used more and more to perform processes behind the scenes in this technology driven world. Case in point: Google’s RankBrain is where A.I. meets SEO. No, you didn’t just start reading a chapter from Star Trek, A.I. is real and it is becoming more a part of our lives each day. Foregoing any sort of formal announcement, Google’s Senior Research Scientist, Greg Corrado, casually mentioned it during a recent interview with Bloomberg.

What Is RankBrain and How Does It Work?
Google’s algorithms, currently hummingbird, take a search inquiry and breaks it down into keywords which they then match to keywords elsewhere on the Web in order to give the user the best results related to the search request. That is the short version. RankBrain will now come alongside, not replace, the current algorithms and, instead of determining the results based solely on the keywords, Rankbrain can display search results based on what it is the person searching is really looking for. In other words it uses the keywords to put reasoning behind the search, learns from other searches performed, and serves up even more targeted results.

Will RankBrain Affect My Website Search Traffic and SEO Strategy?
The question on everyone’s mind now is, “How will this affect my current website traffic and SEO strategy?” The answer is, if you are doing SEO right, then it won’t change anything. Google has been shaping their algorithm for some time now to focus on serving results comprised of quality content that is readable for humans, not search engines. This content is built around what the consumer is really looking for and what RankBrain is looking for, and, as brands and business owners, you should be delivering this type of content already. Those that are still using the keyword stuffing method to rank in search will not survive. RankBrain could already be affecting your search traffic and you may not even realize it, since for several months prior to making any announcement Google has already been rolling it out. If you haven’t been cleaning up your keyword stuffed content, you better get busy. BTW … Our team at Advice can help, if you need us. We are just a click away.


How to Create Content that RankBrain is Looking For

• Know your audience. I’ve said it before and it cannot be stressed enough. Your content must match what your audience is searching for.
• Know the questions your customer have or the problems they need solved and focus your content around those things.
• Find out what your audience wants by simply asking them in surveys and paying attention to comments, likes, and shares on your social media sites.
• Communicate with sales and customer service teams because they are interacting with your customers on a daily basis and hear their questions, problems and needs.

SEO is not dead and, in fact, RankBrain makes SEO even more crucial in all of your content, but your SEO strategy needs to be incorporated into your content marketing strategy. These are no longer two independent processes, but interwoven tightly together.

Want to know more about RankBrain? Here is a good FAQ to check out.

If you remember your content has to be useful, helpful and be what your audience is looking for you will be good to go.

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Google RankBrain: What You Need to Know

 

The next big thing is here and it’s called Google RankBrain.

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) system that is handling and processing a big portion of Google’s incoming search queries, and it’s poised to change search forever.
Until now, Google’s search queries have been sorted, processed and handled by algorithms like Hummingbird, Google’s well-known search system, and while RankBrain isn’t completely set to replace Hummingbird, it does present a series of important changes for how people search and are matched with relevant information.


What is RankBrain?
Like we mentioned, RankBrain is an AI system that is capable of learning from search patterns and adjusting itself to provide better results in the future. The system was introduced in early 2015 (although Google says its been rolled-out for a few months now) to handle the 15 percent of search queries that are totally foreign to the Google system. While 15 percent may not seem like much, it’s important to note that, since Google processes upward of three billion searches each day, 15 percent still amounts to about 450 million search queries each day that Google doesn’t recognize and was previously unable to adequately process.

Google’s hope is that RankBrain’s intelligent system will be able to better process complex, long-tail queries and interpret them better in order to offer better results for searchers. Since RankBrain learns as it goes, it’s likely that the new system will be able to discover patterns within complex and seemingly disjointed searches and distinguish the connection in order to present better search results.
Additionally, RankBrain is projected to be able to associate groups of searches with sets of results that it believes users will enjoy and find valuable. In addition to taking some work off of the hands of the Google engineers, it is obviously Google’s great hope that RankBrain will help create a more intuitive search experience.

RankBrain and Google Signals: The Intersection
When you type “How Google…” into Google, the first suggested result that pops up is “How Google works,” which is comical, because nobody quite seems to know. Throughout Google history, the way that Google ranks webpages in search indexes has been a big, muddy mystery that relies on hundreds of vaguely-defined “signals.” These signals include everything from keywords to the perceived quality of a page through the eyes of a search engine.

Until now, these signals have fed into a system called PageRank and, once they were processed, each page received a PageRank score that was used as one more signal to determine indexing position. From there, the complex web of signals was fed through the Hummingbird algorithm to make the final decision on which pages Google displayed prominently and which it didn’t.

Since the introduction of RankBrain, however, the signal system has become just a bit more complicated. Before RankBrain, Google often claimed to have more than 200 primary ranking signals that could be broken down into 10,000 sub-signals. RankBrain was introduced, however, and Google is now saying that RankBrain is the third most important ranking signal the search engine giant will rely on from now on.

Although Google won’t disclose the first and second ranking factors they rely upon, the fact that RankBrain is sitting comfortably at third indicates that this is a huge and very important development in the Google-verse.

How RankBrain can Help Google Refine its Search Experience
Until RankBrain came along, Google’s search queries were all ultimately handled by some Google engineer or SEO in an office somewhere. In addition to this being a huge amount of work for the engineers or SEOs in question, this system had limitations inherent within the database connections and list work it entailed. Although Google has long-since included automation within this process, it’s still difficult for any group of humans to process more than three billion daily searches.

With this in mind, RankBrain is here to leverage Google’s expertise about complex queries and to turn daily search into something new and exciting through consistent learning and a more streamlined SERP setup that offers users access to important information without requiring them to click through to a website. This is possibly one of the most exciting aspects of the RankBrain development — that users can now search information and be matched with correct pages without ever supplying by-the-book “correct” search terms.

For example, thanks to RankBrain, you can search “When was George Bush’s wife born?” and be met with a breakdown of the life and history of one-time First Lady Laura Bush without ever entering her name.



Results like this allow searchers to connect with more intuitive information more instantly without the added hassle of shifting through websites or navigating away from the search page.

The Future of RankBrain
While it’s impossible to know exactly where the Google Gods will take RankBrain in the future – one thing is for sure: RankBrain is big.

In addition to suddenly being the third-most important ranking signal for webpages, RankBrain is also handling a massive influx of daily searches, which means that the Google team obviously has a huge amount of confidence in the system as a whole. As the RankBrain update continues to roll out, there is hope far and wide that it will create a better search experience for Google users and a more intuitive search system for Google engineers. Additionally, RankBrain is posed perfectly to adapt to coming technologies like Voice Search. While the future of Google’s various developments is notoriously difficult to predict, we can bet that RankBrain is something we will be hearing a whole lot more about in the near future.

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