SEO News You Can Use: How to Approach Content Writing After Latest Google Algorithm Update

The latest core Google algorithm update – just call it BERT – has placed more emphasis on neural matching and natural language processing in an effort to better understand search queries.

Google wants to better understand what content is all about to help you find the information you’re seeking.

For SEO professionals, it’s become even more important to write content for humans that is to the point and – as I was taught for 25 years as a professional journalist – doesn’t bury the lead.

In the latest Moz.com Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy does a good job of explaining ways to approach your content writing. She emphasizes that writing content that’s easier for Googlebot to understand actually makes you a better writer and helps you produce better content for humans. Reedy is the vice president of strategy at UpBuild, a boutique technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics.

Some of Reedy’s tips for content writers: Use short, simple sentences, use only one idea per sentence, connect questions to answers, be specific first and then explain nuance, get to the point quickly, avoid jargon and “marketing speak,” organize your information to match the user journey, break out subtopics with headings, format lists with bullets or numbers and master grammar and spelling.

More SEO News You Can Use

The Wall Street Journal is Trying to Take Down Google: Last week, The Wall Street Journal released an investigative report saying Google interferes with its search algorithms to change your search results. Search Engine Land writer Barry Schwartz picked apart the newspaper’s claims in an article that said the WSJ “had absolutely nothing to back it up.” Also, more here from SEL on the WSJ story.

Google Announces New Filters to Google Search Console Performance Report: Google Search Console now includes new filters to the performance report to show you how well your product results are doing in search. Click and impression data when rich results display based on your use of product rich results markup can now be viewed.

Google Has Improved at Indexing JavaScript, but Issues Remain: JavaScript content is being indexed faster than ever by Google, but there is still plenty of room to improve. JavaScript indexing delays are still a big problem.

JOANN Used Phrasee’s AI-Powered Copywriting to Increase Revenue: JOANN crafts and fabric supplier store used Phrasee’s AI-powered copywriting to improve customer engagement that led to more opened emails and a 26% increase in clicks.

Case Study: Rich Answers in Google Mobile Search Queries Are Surging: According to Perficient Digital’s study of 1.4 million Google mobile search queries, the number of rich answers has surged compared to 2018. There have been dramatic increases in carousels (especially image carousels). The study found that rich answers in Google mobile search results have more than doubled since 2018.

Bing Improving its Image Search Engine: Bing is improving the understanding of the relationships between user queries, images and web pages to make its image search engine more precise. Bing is also adding multi-granularity matching to image search with new vector-math and attribute-match.

Not So Fast, Google: Bing revealed last week that it’s way ahead of Google. Well, at least in terms of the use of BERT. Bing said its been using BERT since April — about six months before Google made the update to its algorithm — and it’s worldwide instead of only in two dozen countries.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.