Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest (21-27 September)

rgray weekly marketing insights and news diges 2109-2709

What are pre-rendered keywords and how to cope with them? Is Google ignoring your meta descriptions? What are the 55 essential web design stats to guide your online strategy in 2020? TikTok has reached an agreement and much more from the world of digital marketing in our new episode of the RGray Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest.

  • Finally, TikTok has reached an agreement with Walmart and Oracle, and Trump confirmed it, even though it is not a comprehensive sale. See more details in our article below.
  • Google is certain that the pre-rendered result needs to take the first position. It’s probably not the best news for you if you see pre-rendered results on keywords you want to rank first for. So, how should you deal with this issue? Read more in our weekly digest.
  • If you are the one who spends a lot of time on writing meta descriptions for your blog posts, you might be curious whether Google uses the meta descriptions that you post. See our article to figure it out.
  • Do you know what visitors are searching for on the website they visit? Want to create a new website for your company in the next few months? Check out the infographic our teams shared on 55 essential web design stats in 2020. 

1. “It’s over. It’s done”

Moving on to our ‘’weekly rubric’’ TikTok drama, finally, an agreement was reached, and Trump confirmed it.

Moving on to our ‘’weekly rubric’’ TikTok drama, finally, an agreement was reached, and Trump confirmed it.

Let’s take a look at the quick summary:

  • TikTok has reached an agreement with Walmart and Oracle, but it is not a comprehensive offer. While TikTok has come to an arrangement with both Oracle and Walmart, it is more of a partnership than a deal, and it has not been speculated to sell global operations. All US consumer data will be managed by Oracle, while Walmart will act as a commercial partner.
  • The deal ‘in principle’ was accepted by Trump, preventing the ban scheduled for Sunday. The final deal is not exactly what Trump had been requesting, but all the same, he gave it his stamp of approval. The looming threat of a TikTok ban in the U.S. is over, barring any unexpected circumstances.
  • It is announced that the U.S. headquarters of TikTok will be in Texas, and it will have up to 25k workers.

We assume (and hope) that this is the last TikTok-ban news that we’re going to share with you for a while. But who knows what’s next? It’s 2020!

2. What are pre-rendered keywords?

Here’s a little tip from Mike Sonders on Twitter, and it all has to do with keywords pre-rendered.

If you’re new to the word, here comes a short explanation: when Google is ‘very certain’ that it knows which website to rank first, that page will be pre-rendered for faster loading times.

So, what does that stand for SEO Let’s take a look at how to cope with pre-rendered results:

·   You’ll need some kind of SEO tool to find out which results are pre-rendered in the SERPs. Mike suggests the SEO Minion Chrome add-on.

·   After downloading it, do a simple Google search. In the thread on Twitter, Mike takes the term ‘’form builder’’ as an example of the keyword and JotForm as the pre-rendered top result.

How to deal with this issue? It’s probably not the best news for you, if you see pre-rendered results on keywords you want to rank first for, just don’t compete for that keyword. Google is certain that the pre-rendered result needs to take the first position.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go after these keywords, just try to not prioritize it, concentrating your SEO efforts elsewhere can sometimes be better!

However, even though the top result is pre-rendered and hard to compete with, it is not guaranteed that you can’t turn up on the first page for plenty of clicks.

Experimentation is a must when it comes to SEO!

3. Is Google ignoring your meta descriptions?

Do you spend plenty of time writing meta descriptions for your blog posts and product pages?

Anyway, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend, because it’s all useless.

The relevance of meta descriptions is just another SEO debate that makes noise, yet it’s quite important.

However, instead of reading thousands of thoughts on Facebook groups regarding this topic, just take a look at our summary for the research done by Evan Hall at Portent.

With brand terms filtered out, they used a list of 30,000 keywords taken from their customers. After, they entered the keywords into STAT Search Analytics and collected rankings for search results for both desktop and mobile.

The objective was to figure out whether Google uses the meta descriptions that you post.

The outcomes were the following:

  • First-page rewrite rank: 68% for desktop and 71% for mobile. So, about 30% of the time when a site ranks on the first page, Google takes the meta description tag for the snippet.
  • Rewrite rate by search volume: everything depends on the keyword search volume, the bigger it is, the less chance it is that Google will rewrite the meta description.
  • Rewrite rate by query length: it is the same as for search volume, long-tail queries are likely to have search result snippets that do not use the meta description of the page.

So, if you are still asking what you should do with your meta descriptions, just be smart about it. Don’t think about giving up on writing a strong meta description, especially if you’re going for high search volume keywords. It is safer to spend more time and think about the better meta description.

4. 55 Essential Web Design Stats to Guide Your Online Strategy in 2020 and Beyond [Infographic]

Want to create a new website for your company in the next few months? Are you curious about what visitors are searching for on the SEO website they visit?

Our team shared the stats you need in this infographic.

Take a look at the brief of the stats:

  • Website visitors need just 0.5 seconds to form an opinion on the site they are visiting
  • 38% of people will leave a website if it doesn’t look appealing
  • 85% of adult website users believe the mobile version of a website should be just as good as the desktop version

See the infographic below for more statistics.

55 Essential Web Design Stats to Guide Your Online Strategy in 2020 and Beyond