RankBrain and Searches Worded Like Questions

What Google confirmed

Google confirmed yesterday that it uses a machine-learning system called RankBrain to help process search results, and has done for the past few months.

Its job is interpretation. When someone types a search Google has not seen before, RankBrain makes an educated guess at what it means by relating unfamiliar words and phrases to ones it already understands.

That matters because a good share of the searches Google sees each day are new to it: long, oddly worded, or phrased the way people talk.

It is one signal among many, it replaces nothing else, and there is no setting on a website that switches it on.

What it is not

• Not a penalty: it does not demote a site for anything it did.
• Not an update with a date to recover from.
• Not something to tune for with a trick or a tag.
• Not a reason to rewrite everything this week.
• Not the end of keywords, which still describe what you do.

The third is worth dwelling on. A system built to work out what a searcher means has less use for pages written to match exact phrases, and more for pages that say plainly what they offer.

How people search now

People type, and increasingly speak into their phones, the way they would ask a person: who gets golf balls out of a pond, how to hang a heavy mirror on concrete, is a twenty-year-old furnace worth repairing.

Searches like that are long, specific and often unique. Nobody wrote a page for that exact phrase, and nobody should.

What Google needs from your site is enough plain description of what you do, and enough answers to real questions, to connect the two.

Describe services in customers' words

Trades and specialists describe their work in the terms of the trade. Customers use ordinary words, and sometimes the wrong ones.

A site that says only HVAC where customers say furnace, or remediation where they say mould cleanup, leaves Google to bridge the gap.

RankBrain may get better at bridging it, but a visitor who lands on the page still has to recognise their problem in your words. Use both: the trade term once, explained, and the everyday word wherever it reads naturally.

The best source of those words is your own inbox and phone. Write down how customers describe the job when they first get in touch.

Answer the long, specific questions

Every business hears the same questions: how long it takes, roughly what it costs, whether it works on my kind of house, whether I need to be home.

Those are the long searches. Answer them on the pages where they belong, in plain sentences that use the question's own words. A page about a service can carry five or six.

This is not an FAQ page for its own sake. It is the information a customer would otherwise get only by phoning you.

Stop writing a page for every keyword

Many small business sites carry pages that differ by a word or two: emergency plumber, 24-hour plumber, plumber near me, each with the same paragraph and the phrase swapped in.

They were written on the theory that Google matched pages to exact phrases. That was never the whole story, and a system that relates similar searches to each other makes it less true still.

Google already moved against near-identical pages made for town and keyword variations in March. Merge them into one strong page per service, and redirect the old addresses to it.

A worked example

A golf ball diver recovers balls from the ponds and water hazards at about a dozen courses, then cleans, sorts and grades them and sells them by the dozen, online and to pro shops.

His site had been built around phrases: a page each for used, recycled, lake and refurbished golf balls, with the same few sentences under different headings. He does not even sell refurbished balls, which are repainted.

The grades were shown as a row of letters, and nothing explained what separated one from the next.

Meanwhile his inbox was full of questions: whether a ball that sat in a pond flies as far, what the grades mean, whether he stocks a particular brand, and from course managers, who pays whom.

The rebuild merged the four pages into one page about the balls, in golfers' words first, with each grade explained in a sentence and shown in a photograph. The old addresses redirect to it.

Below that, the inbox questions are answered plainly, including the one about distance, which in his experience depends on how long a ball sat in the water. Course managers have a page of their own.

What has not changed

Everything that mattered last week still matters. Pages need to load quickly, work on phones and say clearly what the business does and where.

Links from other sites, a complete Google My Business listing and genuine reviews count as much as they did.

A title and a description for each page, written for a person, are still how a page introduces itself in the results.

Do not chase the announcement

Expect emails offering to optimise your site for RankBrain. Google has said little about how it works, and nobody outside Google can tune a page to it.

What helps is the ordinary work a good web team does anyway: clear pages, real answers, one page per service.

The counter-case

For a business whose customers search with a few plain words, such as a cafe's name or a trade and a town, little changes. Those searches were never hard to interpret.

Nor is this a reason to fill pages with long questions nobody asks. Answer the ones customers actually put to you, and stop there.

A site with a handful of clear pages, already written in plain words, can treat this as confirmation rather than a task.

For everyone else: customers' own words, real answers, and one strong page per service.

What to do

1. List the questions customers ask by phone and email.
2. Note the words they use for your services.
3. Find pages that differ only by a keyword.
4. Merge them into one page per service.
5. Redirect the old addresses to it.
6. Answer the questions where they belong.
7. Ignore offers to optimise for RankBrain.

Step one is where the useful material is. The questions customers already ask you are the long searches other people are typing, worded the way real customers word them.

How Google's quality changes roll out, and why cause and effect blur, is covered in Panda rolls out slowly this time.

Frequently asked questions

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