At SMX the team did a short interview with Frédéric Dubut, the PM of overall Bing's core search team, who said that he thinks SEOs need to move from keyword based research practices to intent research practices. He said with search engines focusing more on intent versus keywords, with the deployment of BERT and other machine learning techniques - that is an important area SEOs should focus on in 2020.
Here is the video:
Here is the 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.
I love it when Bing folks tell us how to optimize for Google. :)
But seriously, the keyword versus intent research is an important point that some of you ma not be thinking about.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
