How to Use Google Tag Manager and Improve your SEO Results

Google Tag Manager is something that you may have never heard of when researching tags.

Having not heard of it isn’t unusual since many people state that they have no idea what it is or how it works.

Would you believe that this tool has been around since 2005? Google Tag manager is free and fairly easy to use if you know how.

Let us help you understand what Google Tag Manager is and how to use it to propel your digital marketing forward.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager is a tool that is about the tags and code snippets associated with your website. These tags and code snippets help to generate organic SEO results and provide you with valuable insights into the success of your website. Therefore, it is essential that you understand what tags are and what the best ways to use them are.

Tags:

Tags are essentially a snippet of a code that will help you to measure traffic and monitor your online visitations. The traffic can include anything from first-time visitors, repeat visitors and even those from within your business who visit your site.

Essentially, what tags do is they help to give you all the information for making smart digital decisions. The types of information you will get are things like route paths of visitors, spam and so forth. This information will ultimately help you with your digital marketing efforts.

Popular tags include:

• Google Analytics (Another way to track and control traffic to your site)
• AdWords (An advertising system that lets you bid on certain keywords to order clickable ads in Google search)
• Floodlight (A conversion tracking platform)

With so many tags to choose from, it can quickly get confusing and difficult for you to manage. That is why Google Tag Manager is so important.

Tags are important because your ranking will depend largely on your tags. There are different kinds of tags that you would use throughout your website. The main tags you would use are Meta Tags. These tags do three main things for your website:

1. Meta tags help your website page ranking considerably.
2. Search Engine Results and where your website is ordered.
3. Lets searchers know what the content of each web page is.

Here is how Google Tag Manager Works:

Essentially this tool will allow you to do two main things. These things are:

1. Add tags to your website and 2. Configuration values if you created a mobile app.

Google Tag Manager will help save you time by helping you to manage all the codes you have. Since each of these codes require several tags associated with your website, you need an efficient way to manage them.

*You should also know that tags throughout your website can increase your site speed. Site speed is important, and you can find out why here and by contacting us.

Google Tag Manager also saves you time by helping you if you need to debug your code. Usually, you would only do this if something wasn’t working right on your website. When you need to debug your code, that can be an excruciatingly long process that can quickly get complicated. Through Tag Manager, this process will be less painful and more efficient.

How Google Tag Manager works is by running on a tag management system that will allow you to integrate tracking into your website. You can add enhanced tracking using this tool without the need for a development team.

The primary benefits of using Google Tag Manager are:

• It will help your performance by increasing site speed and agility.
• Save you money by giving you enhanced tracking capabilities
• Offers you a debugging tool that is built directly into it.
• It will integrate with all third-party tags as well as Google.
• Check for errors and help speed up tag loading to be sure they work.
• Embedded security features.

Some of the features of Google Tag Manager are:

• You can manage and update tags quickly and make better decisions.
• Have complete control over how and when to engage tags.
• The intuitive user interface that makes it easy to use and manage.
• You will have the ability to share access through control permissions.
• There are templates you can use when looking for new marketing solutions.

If you are still following along, you are probably wondering now how Google Tag Manager can help you improve your SEO results. Well, there are many impactful ways it can do this. However, we are only going to cover five of them here.

Ways Google Tag Manager Improves Search Engine Optimization:

Along with all the other ways to improve your SEO results, (which we can help you with by contacting us here) check out these five ways Google Tag Manager works together with SEO to help make your site more visible.

1. Helps you to understand where visitors engage in your website.

Using the Tag Manager, you have access to something called auto events. What this does is track the behaviours of your visitors. Therefore, you will be able to see things like actions and conversions. Know where your visitors click on your website pages, see if your embedded media is being looked at or even how your visitors scroll through your website. Furthermore, you will be able to see how visitors arrived at your site and what path they took to get there.

What makes this useful for SEO purposes is that you will have a clear line of sight into the behaviours of your visitors and thus, you will know where to improve on conversion and engagement. Also, knowing where your customers came from will help you to figure out where more marketing is needed in order to generate traffic from other avenues as well.

2. You will have help with Schema implementation.

Having a Tag Manager to help your SEO situation through Schema implementation is important. Since Schema is a type of markup for your site that provides additional signals to all popular search engines regarding the content of your website, you want this. Schema, otherwise known as structured data, helps with rich results in search engines and are a great way to increase your local SEO ranking. If you are interested, we can tell you more about Schema and local SEO by contacting us.

Though you can implement schema directly into your HTML, there are many issues you can run into doing it that way. Using Google Tag Manager, you can use an HTML tag instead and avoid a lot of the issues you would otherwise experience, making this task painless and efficient.

3. Helps you with injecting metadata into your website.

Through the use of the same HTML implementation, you would use for your schema; you can also use it to inject metadata. What makes this important is that metadata is how you would use a number of SEO features on your website. These various features can include things like your page title, your meta description, your noindex tags and so forth. Having the ability to implement these elements as well as edit them using Tag Manager is important as it will give you control over your organic presence.

Tag Manager is the way you want to go when implementing these elements because you may not have access to a CMS or you don’t have a developer who can implement those in for you. Using Tag manager, you can achieve the same goals as using the CMS or developer without having to wait.

4. You can be sure of accurate indexing.

Define your URL variables in order to take out any additional parameters that might have accidentally been added using Google Tag Manager. Once that is done, you can build a custom HTML tag using a code generated through JavaScript to reference canonical tags. These tags can be inserted into the head section of your page.

By defining your URL variables, you will be able to ensure that there are no additional variations of your URL that can be indexed by Google. The only URL that will be indexed is your default one, and that is the one you want to have indexed. Therefore, using Tag Manager, you can be sure that you will always have accurate indexing.

5. Make sure all traffic data to your website is accurate.

Many times, you need to identify various types of traffic that comes to your site, and you can do this using Google Analytics. However, you also need to isolate these various types of traffic. If you, like many other website owners, want to eliminate spam or traffic from within your business, you can do this using Tag Manager.

How Tag Manager helps you to identify and isolate these variables is through the use of blocking triggers. Since Google Analytics limits the number of filters you can apply, you want to be able to use these blocking triggers that are built using custom variables and event triggers that are customized. However, you want to be aware that when you use blocking triggers, any traffic types that you block will not be included in your Google Analytics views. Also, be aware that this will include your unfiltered views. So be sure that this is what you want when you choose to use Google Tag Manager to implement blocking triggers.

Google Tag Manager, yes or no?

Ultimately, Google Tag Manager is a great tool to have. Since it is a universal tool that can be used for a large range of functions using the various application features, you want to dive more into it. There is so much that Google Tag Manager can do to help you improve SEO ranking and organic SEO results. We have only begun to discuss the ways using Tag Manager can be beneficial to you and your digital marketing endeavours. There is much more you are going to want to investigate that Google Tag Manager can do for you and your website.

What now?

Since you don’t want to be at the mercy of needing a developer or waiting for technical help from those who are already strained, you can use Google Tag Manager to help you out. By saving you both time and effort, the various ways to use this tool will help you improve your websites overall success.

You want to be in control of your website. Do this by using Google Tag Manager to do a lot of the work you would otherwise outsource. Utilizing this liberating tool can only be a good thing when you are looking to improve upon your digital marketing efforts.

Curious to find out more?

Feel free to get in touch with us or leave a comment, and we can help you find out more about Google Tag Manager, improving your SEO ranking and organic SEO results. There are many different tools you can use to generate the traffic you want to see on your website. We can help. Please fill out the form below to get a free, no obligation quote from us.