SEO is Not Just About Keywords But Also UX

Google’s algorithms generate search results considering hundreds of factors. The most important among those remain content relevance and the share of referral links.

The browser still rates content relevance based on keywords but has leaped forward in processing conversational queries as Google improved the Natural Language Processing algorithms and launched the resulting BERT tool in addition to RankBrain. BERT has already been “fed” a hundred of the largest Wikipedias, so now the system understands not just English only.

BERT is open sourced, and its updates are regularly published on the Chromium blog, so other chromium-based browsers will probably implement new algorithms as well.

This means that Google now understands search queries more precisely, even those submitted for the first time or vague ones. It not only perceives the context better, but can also find websites with synonymous key phrases. Therefore, there is no more need to worry about long-tail keywords, what matters is whether the content is useful.

However, when choosing from two equally relevant results, the browser focuses on other signals, and among those UX metrics weigh the most. Users eagerly vote with their feet against sluggish sites, so Google promotes sites that are fast and user-friendly.

Google has selected three UX metrics as signals, calculated thresholds and integrated measuring tools for each of them. New signals will launch in May 2021.

Do you want to rank higher than your competition? Then your website should load the major content part and respond to the first user action faster than competing sites, and your content is not to jump across the screen while loading.

With the help of dedicated Google tools, you can already assess the performance of your website by the user traffic data and respond to identified issues.