Google Tag Manager Best Practices for SEO Cleanliness
Google Tag Manager is a useful tool that streamlines the adding and updating of website tracking codes for your website. It makes gathering and managing your marketing data easier.
Creating an effective and efficient tracking and monitoring strategy to measure and monitor your SEO efforts is a challenging process. Chances are you are using a number of different platforms, along with numerous measurement tags. This makes the process time consuming and complex, not to mention you need technical knowledge.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool from the search engine giant, Google. It is used to implement and manage your marketing and analytical tags on your site, without having to write or modify the code yourself.
The tags are responsible for collecting and sending information to third-party services, such as Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. They help you track and monitor user interactions on your website, including pages visited, what user click on, and how they arrive on your website.
Google Tags Manager holds onto all your third party tags in one space, integrating with your website. This communicates with your site, sending collected data to your chosen third party services when users interact with your content.
Google Tag Manager has three main components for collecting and sending data from your website to your chosen third-party service.
Google Tag Manager deploys marketing tags on your website without having to modify any code. It simplifies the integration of third party services, such as Google Analytics, by handling their tags
Google Analytics, on the other hand, analyses the data collected by the tags, providing you with valuable insights into website traffic sources, user behaviour, and engagement.
You can start using Google Tag Manager by signing into your Google account and heading to the Google Tag Manager website, clicking on “create account.” This step involves filling out your name, country, where your tags exist on your site, select your website, and create. You will need to accept the terms of service.
Next you will see some code snippets that need to be installed on your site. You can add them by clicking OK. Google Tag Manager will add the codes to your website.
The first snippet of code should be added in the <head> of your website. The higher you place it the better, as this is the tag that will collect and send any user information.
Add the second code snippet to the <body> of your content, ideally immediately at the opening to ensure that Google Tag Manager continues to run even if the user has blocked JavaScript on their Chrome browser.
If you have a Wordpress website, then you will find plugins for installing Google Tag Manager on your site. You can simply search the plugins on your WordPress dashboard, searching for GTM4WP, then install.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can add your Google Tag Manager ID under settings.
Tracking your SEO efforts is essential to ensuring your online success. Google Tag Manager is an important part of an effective tracking and monitoring system, centralising your marketing tags. If you need assistance managing or deploying Google Tag Manager, get in touch with the talented team at Genie Crawl. We would love to help!
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