You have probably never heard about RankBrain but not to worry; you are not alone. It is the latest Google’s Algorithm. When Google announced in October 2015 that it would be delivering search results with the help of artificial intelligence, Google RankBrain is the machine-learning AI system it was referring to at the time. Using machine-learning AI system means that RankBrain consumes knowledge and processes queries instantaneously like the human brain and uses the information to produce the most relevant and suitable results to the users. With Google RankBrain, you can search a query either through a voice command or text and then it sifts through billions of pages that it can access and offers the best results according to the specific query. RankBrain was mainly created so that it can solve long, ambiguous and complex queries including jargon and new words that are created by professionals in different industries or regular people as well as questions that it has never dealt with before.
Google also announced that RankBrain is their third most crucial signal when it comes to ranking pages on their search engine. This declaration causes panic among people due to the fear that robots will be in charge of Search Engine Optimization on the search engine giant. However, instead of seeing it as a threat, businesses should see this new algorithm as an opportunity and focus on discovering what they can do to optimize their content for RankBrain. Here is how content marketers and SEO experts can optimize for rank brain:
1. Understand RankBrain
The first thing you need to do is study Google RankBrain and learn everything you need to know about it. Acknowledge that robots are not going anywhere anytime soon. Machine learning refers to the computers’ ability to teach itself while artificial intelligence is the way in which the computer acquires knowledge and builds upon its existing knowledge just like a human brain functions.
2. Content; Write naturally, target specific audience, include links
Ironically, despite the fact that Google RankBrain works like a robot, it prefers content that has been written naturally and conversationally. The quality of your content is crucial if you want to benefit from RankBrain. Write content that targets a specific audience, is clear and easy to understand. If you write for a specific audience, you will increase the chances of the content showing up for related searches. You can narrow your audience to a particular target and ensure that you create target meant for that niche by either using keywords, specific topics, and recommendations to grab their attention, aligning your services or products to their needs and offering solutions to problems that your target audience may search on the internet. You should also ensure that your content is detailed. RankBrain has been found to make use of co-occurrence or terms that appear frequently in a certain text to provide the most relevant results to internet users. It is also advisable to incorporate authoritative websites, white papers and case studies within the content. Linking will help to make your content credible and useful to searchers. It will also enable Google to translate the usefulness of your content. When you want to include links, you should consider the following:
- Whether the link is relevant to the topic
- Whether the audience will be interested in the link
- The domain authority of the site you want to link
- Quality of the content
3. Create content that can be found using voice search
RankBrain was designed to generate searches for queries that have little data such as vague requests. Hence, it is important to use content that can be found using voice search. To achieve this, you need to make use of voice query matching and user targeting when you are creating content.
4. Focus on co-occurrence
Research shows that content with co-occurrence ranks better with Google RankBrain. Therefore, it will be prudent for content marketers and SEO experts to pay attention to groups of terms that are connected and ensure that they appear more frequently. This means that you should make use of semantically related words instead of focusing all attention on keyword stuffing which is less efficient with this kind of algorithm.
Final thoughts
Undoubtedly, Google RankBrain has revolutionized the way SEO works thus content marketers and SEO experts should look for new techniques to ensure that they make most of the situation. People have made predictions that machine understanding and artificial intelligence is going to grow more important as days go by. If you develop and improve your content, you will definitely notice an improvement in your Google ranking. You can improve by using natural language, clear content, quality links, and voice searchable content.