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SMITH – What’s it about, and How Does it Compare to BERT?

In the ever-changing digital landscape, Google is a friend we all turn to for all our queries. From searching for a doctor nearby to getting answers to our problems, we chat directly with Google, even without realizing it. But Google is made of algorithms, and algorithms are not people.  Advancements in technology made it feasible for algorithms to accurately understand slang, language expression, meaning of different words, and synonyms to deliver the right search query.  But, have you ever wondered how Google differentiates ‘business relation’ with ‘correlation’ when both have the word ‘relation’ in common? That’s where natural language processing (NLP) comes into the picture. And, this is what gave birth to the concept of BERT and now SMITH! Using these algorithms, Google displays the top stories and features snippets every time you hit the search button. Let’s understand what SMITH is, why it has become the new buzzword, how it differs from its elder brother (BERT), and what SEO experts can do to improve their SERP results with SMITH in town!

Decoding SMITH

According to Google, SMITH stands for Siamese Multi-depth Transformer-based Hierarchical Encoder. Sounds alien? Don’t worry because you don’t have to remember the full-form; no one does! In simple terms, SMITH is the brainchild of Google’s never-ending quest to provide the best and relevant search results. bert-algorithm
It achieves what Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) couldn’t achieve – it compares sentences before, after, and even away from the passage to improve the search results.  SMITH tries to comprehend the entire document and can accurately predict what the next sentence can be. It helps Google puzzle out blocks of sentences, passages, long-form documents, and content – thereby ensuring Google fetches quality search results.

Features of SMITH

  • Improves recommendation of news, articles, and document clustering
  • It gives importance to information architecture
  • Helps with long-tail queries
  • Functions as a text-predictor
  • Works in conjugation with BERT

How SMITH Works?

Let’s understand how SMITH works and helps in fetching the best results. As artificial intelligence is the backbone of the NLP programs, the first step involves algorithm pre-training on specific data set.

For example, if you feed the algorithm with an idiom, “Once in a blue____.” The algorithm is trained to understand that the word ‘moon’ comes next.  When you repeat the above process numerous times with different phrases and sentences, the algorithm becomes smart and predicts the right words. Here, the word ‘moon’ is masked. But, what happens when a user masks an entire sentence from a block of content? How will Google ensure the accuracy of the search results? That’s what SMITH handles! It helps Google unmask the sentence prediction. But, how is it different from its elder brother BERT? Read on to understand

SMITH Vs. BERT – Two sides of the same coin

Though in 2019, BERT was the talk of the tinsel town due to its breakthrough search capabilities, it had some limitations. From understanding long-form paperwork to handling larger input text – the search results were tremendous but restricted to the algorithm’s ability to unmask only words instead of sentences.  Enter SMITH. Though SMITH is not live yet, it outperforms BERT by a whopping 400% – a mindboggling statistic, which could change the landscape of search results.

Pre-training

SMITH: The model was trained using the masked sentence block language modeling task.

BERT: The model was trained using the masked word language modeling task.

The change in the training model made all the difference as SMITH can identify the next paragraphs and block of text in a long-form document.

Understanding long and complicated documents

SMITH: It’s capable of understanding and processing complex documents and queries

BERT: Its use is limited to short sentences.

SMITH was trained to overcome BERT’s shortcomings and inability to understand and process long-form queries and complex documents. In the coming years, SMITH is likely to throw light on why the quality of links is necessary for search results and enhance the understanding of content pages related to one another.

Input text length

SMITH: Maximum input text length is 2048

BERT: Maximum input text length is 512

As SMITH is more efficient with longer documents, it’s likely to change how Google displays the search results.

Cost

SMITH: Splits 2,248 tokens for every document

BERT: Splits 256 tokens for every document

The text requires more speed and memory optimization capability of the NLP algorithm for processing eight times. Building a connection between a few words in a sentence is easier for the algorithm to remember than long-form content. As a result, SMITH is likely to be way more costly than BERT in performing complex jobs. But less expensive than BERT when performing the same job. So, will BERT fall prey to digital Darwinism or work in conjugation with BERT? BERT is the building block of SMITH and will help the new algorithm understand and process short queries.

How SMITH will impact SEO experts and web designer

Even with uncertainty hovering around the launch of SMITH – Google is likely to release it in the coming months. And, when this happens, it’s likely to bring a paradigm shift in the way Google ranks the webpages. To stay abreast with the technological advancement and ensure your efforts yield a higher ranking, follow these four tips for 2021.

1.     Focus on user intent

Like BERT, SMITH uses NLP and machine learning (ML) to know what the user is trying to search – making user or search intent the top priority. Search intent is the results that you get when you search something on Google. For example, when searching for a cardiologist in Texas, a user expects Google to show a list of heart doctors in Texas.

With the tech giant now being able to interpret the user intent like a human brain, a content-intent mismatch could jeopardize your business. Whether you’re an SEO expert or a web-designer, it’s imperative to provide results matching the search intention. The rule here is simple, The better your page matches the search intent, = Higher the page will rank.

2.     Create long-form content

According to a 2019 report, a content of 3000+ words receives:

  • Four times more share
  • Three times more traffic

This was before the SMITH era! If long reads had such a significant impact on the SEO strategy, imagine its amplification after Google rolls out SMITH. Long-form content is your goldfish to a successful SEO strategy as it engagingly provides information.

As SMITH checks the content of paragraphs and blocks of sentences, SEO experts should back your website with content that answers the searcher’s specific questions. You can no longer fool this intelligent algorithm by stuffing keywords in your long-form content. The need of the hour is to create quality content that follows the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) principle of Google. The EAT helps Google decide the usefulness of the content on a website for the searcher. If your content cannot provide what your customer is looking for, it’s not SMITH friendly and will not rank for that keyword. That’s why sharing and publishing high-quality long-form content is no longer an option.

3.     Use content formatting or structuring

With SMITH capable of searching long queries, using header tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc., would only help the algorithm match the user intent with your content. Furthermore, header tags break up the text into small paragraphs, lending a helping hand to the SMITH algorithms. For example, the absence of a single H1 tag ensures that Google misses out on your web page’s key theme. When you use more than the H1 tag in your content, it confuses the algorithm as it cannot interpret which H1 is of prime importance. Having a single H1 in your webpage or long-form content could be the difference between failure and success. Structured data provides an additional description to your webpage on the SERP in the form of reviews and ratings. This helps Google crawler’s index website more comprehensively and ensures a perfect match between the search intent and content.

4.     Give importance to voice search technology

Voice-search-SEOWith 55% of U.S. households likely to own a smart speaker by 2022 and 27% of the global population using voice search on mobile – voice search technology could change the SEO game in the SMITH era. From Apple’s Siri to Amazon’s Alexa, your digital customers use voice searches to search on Google. Interestingly, a majority of the voice search queries are long-tail. For example, a user is likely to say, “What are the best digital marketing strategies for 2021?” using a voice search. Your customer may limit it to “best digital marketing strategies 2021” when typing. As voice searches best perform with long-form phrases, you need to identify these phrases to attract organic web traffic. With SMITH capable of processing long-form queries, voice search is likely to help you rank better in the SERP.

Conclusion

The mantra for 2021: Focus on long-form content, focus on providing meaningful and high-quality content. If you’re still planning to optimize content for keyword and Meta titles, you’re probably living in the dinosaur age. With current trends, SEO is only going to get more complex. A business that keeps track of these changes is the one that ranks higher on the SERP. The degree to which Google decides to implement SMITH remains to be seen, but websites delivering high-quality content are the ones that are likely to reap benefits from the change.

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site within the first page results. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML, schema markup, Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #30 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines in order to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site. THe best backlinks are those from high traffic content by reputable websites.  That’s why content marketing has become an integral part of SEO while also bringing tons of targeted traffic and brand recognition!

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues. If you’re doing your own SEO a couple of good places to start are Majestic SEO and SEMrush.com.

A good search engine marketing and promotion company will look not only at your search ranking goals but also your business plan in order to make profit worthy recommendations.  After all your overall goal is not to only increase your search engine ranking and website traffic but to bring about more business. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

If you need a hand please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us and set up a time for a free consultation.

5 Ways Content Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand

Content marketing is not just a fad. It’s a solid marketing strategy that has brought success to brands and businesses of all sizes. When you do content marketing correctly, you can expect to benefit for a long, long time. So, here are the top 5 ways content marketing can help your brand.

1.    Valuable content brings hordes of traffic to your site

Who doesn’t want traffic? No webmaster in their right minds would say they don’t want traffic. The truth is we build websites and establish a presence on the Internet because we want people to know more about us.

The good news is with content marketing, you can bring a ton of people over to your site without paying exorbitant amounts of money for advertisements. Yes, it will require some money to amplify your content but nowhere near the cost for ads that get minimal results.

2.    You’re building your brand identity

When people see your brand on many valuable posts and articles, you’re essentially letting the world know what your brand is all about. You’re establishing an identity online.

When people go looking for information that falls right up your alley, then chances are people will be able to better recall your brand over your competitors!

3.    You’ll gain your audience’s trust

It takes a lot of work to gain people’s trust. And it’s essentially what content marketing is – it’s a lot of work. But once you’ve successfully established yourself as an authority and your brand starts sticking in people’s minds, then it will be easier to gain their trust. You’ll find that when you’ve captured people’s trust, getting them to follow your calls to action becomes much easier. Remember trust is a long term game so take it slow and steady!

4.    Get higher conversion rates

The most successful content marketing campaigns have excellent conversion rates. This means they’ve successfully positioned themselves as authorities in their industry, and they’ve created content that resonates with their audience. Factor in great web design, and you’ve got a recipe for success!

5.    It’s great for your site’s SEO

There are plenty of SEO benefits to content marketing. When you consistently publish valuable content, you’ll be able to eventually rank for more keywords on search engines.

You’ll have a highly engaged audience on your site, meaning they’re not going to bounce right after they land on your page. You’ll have many people linking to your content (search engines love this!) which will help boost your rankings on search pages.

8 Tips to Increase Website Traffic

1. Update the pages on your website frequently (we’re starting to employ this ourselves!). Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product. Having backlinks will increase web traffic and overall SEO!

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons. Be sure it’s not the same content they can find elsewhere!

4. Add a speak to me script (like we have from Vcita) that will allow for immediate contact or to leave a message.

5. Be sure to brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

6. Create a FAQ page/section which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

7. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark. It’s also a good practice for SEO purposes!

8. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.