Celandine Clark

When seeking to improve rankings, the core task for everyone from the best UK SEO company to the in-house search engine experts has always been keyword research. But Google’s release of BERT is just one more step in the drive towards natural language processing and evolutions in deep learning. BERT is a revolutionary tool, available to help search engines understand what the user is looking for and deliver results. This suggests that SEO optimization teams will see their work moving away from keyword research and more towards studying their users’ intent. Is keyword research now dead? Not necessarily. Searchers will always use keywords to define their searches and identify which of the results match their needs. The key to understanding which keywords will help move content up the rankings is to know your target audience and what questions they want you to answer. Often, knowing the questions your users are asking will guide you towards using more long-tail keywords. So for the moment at least, intent research works hand in hand with keyword research, for everyone from the best website optimisation company to the in-house SEO team.