Juergen Kranz is our CTO and shared his thoughts about the need for NLP and how companies are using it to identify relevant content.
Hey Juergen, what is your role at rellify?
I am serving the product, UX/UI, development, and operations team. These teams are envisioning, designing, building, and running the rellify platform. As we speak, the rellify platform is used internally and by early adopters as well.
Ok then, what is rellify?
Let me start by looking at search engines by the first principle. Users of search engines want to find answers, e.g., buy products or services, educate themselves, and so on. Google, therefore, tries very hard to deliver the best answer with the top entry in their search results. On the other hand, there are millions and millions of websites and content providers who want their content to be found.
In the past decades, the SEO industry tried to guess and re-engineer Google’s search algorithms that were hand-written by human developers. As a result, the SEO industry implemented all kinds of tricks and hacks to get website listings to #1. Luckily for the search engine users (namely all of us), these days are coming to an end. Google has invested a lot in NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning) to train algorithms that, to a certain degree, understand the content and the context of articles on websites. Hence Google is presenting its users with more and more truly relevant content and less SEO “tricked” top ranks. That is really good news for all of us Google users.
What is rellify’s approach?
So rellify’s approach in this area is Content Performance Optimization. We are the first to provide a platform that supports content creators end to end. This starts with analysis and includes writing and monitoring. We don’t do any (old) SEO tricks; we provide our customers with the best-in-class platform to create content that helps them express their unique market position and brings across their benefits – crisp, clear, and to the point. So then the Google NLP search engine finds their relevant content, understands the context, and shows it top-ranked in the search results. No more tricks and hacks, better content, fitting answers, more relevant hits for everyone.
Still, the SEO basics are relevant. Let me be a bit nerdy here: in the algebraic curve sketching for proof of a local maximum, the first derivative has to be zero and the second less than zero. f'(x)=0 & f”(x)<0 (as we all remember, don’t we). We also call it necessary condition and sufficient condition. The same is true for an excellent Google ranking.
As necessary conditions, your page has to load fast. It has to be mobile optimized and satisfy many more “core web vitals.” As a sufficient condition, your content has to be to the point and relevant. You can only achieve a top ranking if you fulfill both conditions. Again, we help our customers with the harder, sufficient conditions of creating relevant content.
What to expect from the rellify SaaS platform:
We use ML and NLP to train our models, to support our customers to understand the context of their content. That way, they can best see what is relevant and what is not. We have a market-first IA (Intelligence Augmentation) content creation editor in our Content Performance platform that will help content producers and writers to create relevant content. There are so many rules and aspects to consider, no writer, no matter how experienced, could possibly consider them all.
Our IA approach will consider all of them in any written word, sentence, and paragraph, all the time. Our monitoring solutions empower the creator to analyze their creation, learn and improve in continuous improvement cycles. Bits and pieces of this holistic solution are available today, but not in a combined platform as with rellify. The integration of all these stages empowers data insights previously impossible to achieve that enable far better content in a more efficient process that will result in top-of-list rankings. Again all in the interest of the user finding relevant content.
Any hints for the future?
Last week at Google-i/o, Google showed a glimpse of where the future of search is heading. What to say, it is heading in our direction, as we don’t use tricks and hacks for old SEO-style ranking. Instead, but we provide a platform for relevant content creation, so our customers can shine with their benefits and USPs and be found better.
