SEOs must focus on intent research practices in 2020

It is more important than ever to update your research methods since the release of BERT and the evolution of natural language processing.

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SMX speaker, Frédéric Dubut of Bing, explains why 2020 is the year SEOs need to evaluate their intent research practices to keep up with the latest developments in deep learning and natural language processing.

Below is the video transcript:

Hi everyone. This is Frédéric Dubut from Bing, here to talk about some of the cool stuff we are looking forward to in 2020.

If you look at 2018, 2019 there’s lots of evolution in the field, of deep learning, natural language processing. Google announced recently they integrated their BERT language model in search results. And what that means for everyone is search engines are shifting from keywords to intent at an accelerating pace.

So if you imagine a few years ago, we were mostly based on keywords, then we are a QR based search engine with a little bit of intent sprinkled on. And what we’re looking forward to in 2020 is that search engines are going to be primarily intent-based, so we’ll understand the core intent better. We’ll understand what the documents mean better, and we’ll be able to do better matches.

For you in the SEO community. what that means, is that some of the current practices around keyword research are probably going to become slowly obsolete and you’ll need to switch to intent research as a practice. So this is super important.

2020 is the year where search engines are shifting to intent primarily.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Frédéric Dubut
Contributor
Frédéric is Senior PM Lead for the Core Ranking team at Bing. He joined the Bing team in 2011 to work on the crawler and was leading until recently the Bing web spam team.

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