Google is in the late stages of developing a new search engine technology named MUM, an acronym for multitask unified model. Heralded as being 1000 times more powerful than its previous update BERT, Google MUM is here to redefine how users find answers through Google’s search engine. With Google accounting for over 70% of all global desktop search traffic, understanding how its search engine works is critical for your finance brand to maintain a strong SEO strategy and be discovered via organic searches. With MUM set to change how people search and how Google displays answers, it’s important your finance brand prepares to remain at the top of search engine rankings.
Everything you need to know about Google MUM
Powered by AI technology, MUM is here to help users with complex search queries. Today, users have to provide thoughtful search queries to find the right answers. For example, a user looking into investing for the first time will have to individually search each question like ‘the difference between ETFs and a mutual fund’ and ‘the best asset manager in the UK’. In real life, a person looking into investing could ask an expert ‘what do I need to know as a first-time investor?’ and be provided with a thoughtful and illuminating response that takes every question into account. This is what Google MUM is recreating.
“ MUM is 1000x more powerful than Google’s last search engine update BERT. ”
The entire premise is Google wants it to take less time and effort for users to get the answers they need. Using the T5 text-to-text framework, MUM is trained across 75 different languages and tasks enabling it to provide a more comprehensive understanding of information and global knowledge. To add to this, it’s also multimodal, meaning it can understand the information in images, with the aim of it being to also understand audio and videos too.
But what does this mean?
While it’s a complex technology to understand unless you’re a tech guru, there are a number of things MUM will change in regard to search engine mechanics. Now, Google will be able to provide more accurate and complex answers to your questions by identifying keywords. In the above example, Google MUM will identify the words ‘ first-time investor’ and understand the many different questions somebody like that will have and provide a pool of answers.
Secondly, MUM will have access to even more information with the ability to translate over 75 languages. This means if there’s key information about investing written in German, Google will provide this as an answer to an English-based query.
At the heart of it, Google’s new update will be able to better understand language to provide clearer results to more complex search queries.
What does this mean for your financial marketing strategy?
The good news is Google MUM won’t mean you have to suddenly reinvent your marketing strategy. However, there are some important things to note:
- There will be less reliance on written information – Which means your finance brand should expand its content strategy to include images, videos, and audio. Taking a multimodal approach to your content strategy will be vital to remain relevant and competitive.
- More competition for search engine rankings – It will be more important than ever to develop and strengthen your SEO as well as provide valuable content across your website.
- Must keep end-users at the forefront of content – As MUM is set to benefit the end-users search results, to continue to appear high on search engine rankings your content needs to be designed with them in mind. As exact responses are beginning to be scrapped in favour of users’ intent, it’s important your content reflects this shift.
At the end of the day, your finance brand will remain competitive after MUM launches if you continue to provide value-driven content. With no date in sight for MUM’s launch as of now, there’s no time like the present to begin creating exceptional, multimodal content that will give you a competitive edge in the future.
