It’s no secret that Google switches it up on us every now and then (even though sometimes those changes are a secret to us). Keywords will always matter, but here are the big six changes to be aware of for your SEO and ranking on Google.
No. 1: It’s the MUM Era – Google had previously launched BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) which understands intent from search queries. Well now there’s MUM. MUM (Multitask United Mode) is Google’s new interpretation model that uses more conversational queries, analyzes video content, and has a higher language count.
No. 2: A Little More Conversation – Google unveiled LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a machine-learning model designed for dialogue. LaMDA wants to have a conversation and provide results based on what users feed it.
No. 3: Shopping is Serious Business – The Shopping search engine has found new life. Google’s Shopping Graph, Linked Loyalty Programs, discount searching, and more cart reminders are among some new shopping features.
No. 4: Just Rank an Excerpt – Can’t rank your page? Just rank for a part of it, then. “Passage indexing” or “passage ranking” allows a page to rank for a specific part instead of ranking for the whole page.
No. 5: Key Moments from Video – Googled will launch two new video structured data types that can give users content for a “Suggested Clips” tab from your videos. Clip markup and Seek markup let you pull out key moments from your videos.
No. 6: Core Web Vitals – Page experience is going to play a larger role in ranking. This is based off of Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics that measure a page’s load speed from a user experience perspective.
Check out Single Grain’s full piece for more deets on Google’s technical specs, retail examples, and Core Web Vitals.