The advancing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has helped us in making decisions by better predictions. AI has given an impact to the lives of many people in many industries.
To make use of AI on the web, companies need optimize their websites for those artificial beings. As for getting attentions, they need to optimize their websites for search engines that are using AI to increasingly create better results.
While many strategies remain the same in SEO, some technological breakthrough in machine learning and algorithms do tweak how search engines work. As for Google, it is using RankBrain.
RankBrain is Google's ANI machine that was first introduced in 2015. It is designed to understand the meaning behind words people are entering in search queries. Google uses machine learning because it admitted that it is seeing an increasing number of queries that are never seen before.
If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it doesn't know, the machine will make guesses as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning, and filter the result accordingly. This makes it more effective in handling never-before-seen search queries or keywords
To understand queries, RankBrain analyzes language of websites indexed by Google in order to make an analysis to a particular search query.
The purpose of RankBrain, is to better understand the meaning of content and the intent behind a search query. Once Google understands the intent, its search engine can apply appropriate Google algorithm signals that deserve the most weight to determine what results to show based on the given search query.
By better understanding the search query, Google Search should give matching results.
Related: How Google Search Works, And How It Can Show You The Things You Want
Google is known to favor big brands over small ones for a variety of reasons. But with RankBrain, a website's engagements, social presence, rates and mentions, can all make a difference. Smaller websites can go up in its search results, if some larger brands have weaker link profile than them in their respective industry.
But again, RankBrain is associated with machine learning. What this means, it will learn to give better results.
As for many marketers, it's business like usual. But the thing is, they should take a closer look at their contents to ensure they can provide the best answers for potential customers/visitors.
RankBrain uses machine learning system, but it still needs to gather sufficient information from websites Google crawls - it needs to understand the meaning of contents that websites are having in order for its AI to make connections. If it can understand the meaning of a content, Google can then correlate it with the data it gathers from people's intention behind search queries.
Google confirmed that RankBrain is among its search engine's top three ranking signals for search, along with links and content as the other two most influential factors.
So the goal for SEO here is to help Google understands what a website's content is all about. Websites need to make sure that meta data and structured data markups are properly applied. Stemming keywords on landing pages can also be necessary because prefix, suffix, pluralization, synonyms and natural word variations can help Google make connections between ideas.
With RankBrain, it is not the end of SEO. Using AI, it wants to tweak it. What this means, the usual SEO still applies, but with intention in mind.