How Google’s RankBrain Update Impacts Your Business




Most people have heard of the new RankBrain algorithm and are familiar with previous updates such as Panda and Penguin but this update will be slightly more complex. The new algorithm will impact your business in several ways, so it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with how it works. The RankBrain update launched October 26 of 2015 so it’s still a fresh topic, but a lot of the inner workings have already been unveiled. One of Google’s top research scientists has referred to RankBrain as the 3rd most important factor Google takes into consideration when determining which results are most relevant for a particular search query.

What’s New In The RankBrain Algorithm?

Even though the new RankBrain algorithm update has been live for several months (October 26th 2015). It wasn’t until recently that Google actually confirmed there is a new aspect that incorporates machine-learning in the update.Huge amounts of search queries (Up to 15% according to Google) will be processed through the machine learning with a goal of better understanding the queries so that Google is able to provide faster, better, more relevant results. RankBrain is essentially the code name Google has given for the addition of AI (artificial intelligence) in the latest algorithm update.

Google hopes to gain a better understanding of it’s users and what their searches mean when they use Google and their new artificial intelligence algorithm brings them one step closer to achieving this. The primary focus is to be able to provide the most relevant results to a particular search query and by being the only search engine currently utilizing AI it puts Google light years ahead of their competitors. In a simple comparison test to evaluate RankBrain’s effectiveness several Google engineers were shown a list of websites and asked to estimate how Google’s algorithm would rank them, the engineers were correct approximately 70% of the time  while RankBrain ranked them correctly 80% of the time.

What does this mean for your business?

It means that keywords in particular will hold less value than context. Businesses should start to think about what questions or phrases their audience will use or ask as a whole instead of focusing on the individual keywords. A deep understanding of your target audiences and the triggers that drive them will be at the heart of any  successful digital marketing strategy, the way we look at SEO is changing.