Having just emerged from a perilous year for the economy — a year in which 6 in 10 businesses closed permanently in the United States — also the businesses that survived the pandemic are bound to be struggling. As many companies deal with scarce resources, the importance of Search Engine Optimization is sometimes overlooked. However, as the e-commerce industry continues to grow, SEO is actually very timely and relevant.
Two important concepts that online businesses owners should be familiar with are BERT and NLP, due to the tremendous impact they have on Google’s search query.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the study of developing AI with the ability to understand human text and speech; Bidirectional Encoder Representations Transformers (BERT) is a framework for NLP that uses textual context to parse ambiguous language. These technologies help Google obtain a better grasp of the nuances used in its queries to produce more accurate search results.
Taking the time to become aware of NLP and BERT, and how they work is valuable for companies as they can use this knowledge to make their companies more detectable and easily searchable.
What words a company uses to describe itself is important because this is the information Google will take into account when indexing their website. These keywords will determine whether a business will appear in the top results when individuals search for similar or related people and organizations, or if they will be doomed to the second search results page.
Established, “blue-chip” companies have the advantage of being well known, and will most likely already have a Google Knowledge Panel — a brief information box about the company that appears on a Google search. For small businesses, getting a Google Knowledge Panel should be a priority, as it boosts your organization’s credibility and makes it stand out. Business owners should begin by thinking of their brand as a cohesive entity to create a consistent and comprehensive identity rather than a disorganized and fragmented one.
Also mobile e-commerce is on the rise. As of January 2021, 92.6% of the world’s 4.66 billion active internet users accessed the internet through mobile devices. For a company’s SEO campaign, this means making their optimization and accessibility for mobile users is crucial. Mobile friendliness can be achieved through white-hat SEO techniques, so businesses should consult or find individuals familiar with these tactics if they want to improve mobile customer experience.
Though the significance of SEO may be overlooked at times in favor of prioritizing other forms of promotion such as social media ads, it remains a prominent way for companies to make themselves known and keep themselves relevant.
