How To Optimize Your Content Strategy for Rankbrain
A lot can happen in a year. Around October of 2015, Google announced the adoption of machine-learning artificial intelligence to help them in ranking search results. A few months later, in an unusually candid moment, Google acknowledged its three top ranking factors and behind fresh content and links sat RankBrain, a feature that many people still don’t even understand, let alone know how to adapt their content strategy to take advantage of Google’s increased dependence on machine learning.
So what is RankBrain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence? Machine learning refers to robots that are self-taught over time while artificial intelligence refers to when a computer can be as smart as a human. RankBrain is thus Google’s application of machine-learning artificial intelligence in that, when a search query is input, it goes through billions of web pages to offer up the one it believes best answers your query.
One of the best things about the rise of content marketing is that it’s softened the more hard interpretations of SEO and social media as merely vehicles for more traffic and higher rankings. Creating content that humans can understand and relate to is a content marketer’s number one objective and thus start writing your content towards the specific personas you’ve developed amongst your readers. And create content that answers common questions, that covers information in such a way as to necessitate references and backlinks, and that does away with a keyword-focused strategy towards one focused on the frequency of certain search queries.
That leads us to our third point for optimizing content for RankBrain: optimize your content for voice searches. Natural language and ambiguous queries are hallmarks of voice searches so be sure not to avoid such language in your writing, while also focusing on user targeting and voice query matching.
Finally, links play a surprisingly big role in machine learning and RankBrain. We say surprising because while backlinks have lost a lot of their importance in the past four years, links are still the number two ranking signal within Google. Building links both to your content and to other trusted sites is a fantastic way to show that your content is trusted and worthy of coming up in RankBrain-assisted searches. Of course, our understanding of RankBrain is always going to be growing and changing, but by following the above strategies, you can at least gain an early foothold over the competition.
