How To Use Google Tag Manager For SEO

Google Tag Manager

Tag Management Systems

Tag management systems allow marketers, SEO experts and webmasters to add or amend tags without having to make any changes to the page itself. A widely used tag manager is GTM which stands for the Google Tag Manager. In many cases, SEOs use tag management systems to implement tracking and remarketing tags such as Google Analytics and Facebook tracking. You may also define rules to amend the HTML code of a page.

Using GTM To Make SEO Changes

The main benefit of using Google Tag Manager in SEO is that it can allow you to apply simple changes to all pages on a website by using a single tag. Using GTM, you can apply changes to page titles, on-page content and canonical tags in order to make the web pages better optimized for search engines. In the past, tag managers were designed using JavaScript to implement the tags. As a result, most webmasters did not consider them as a reliable tool to make SEO changes since search engines like Google do not effectively execute JavaScript.

Most search engine specialists would not use tag managers because any changes they made with JavaScript would not be indexed and crawled by search engines and therefore have a negative impact on page rankings. However, this is no longer the case. Google is continually making significant changes in its algorithm. Recently, the search engine is now learning to implement or pick up SEO changes that were made through tag managers.

How To Make SEO Changes Using Tag Manager

Many of the changes that you can make using GTM for SEO purposes involve amending attributes of elements, adding new elements or adjusting content on a page. You may also use GTM to remove certain elements from a page. To do this, you need knowledge in CSS and HTML as well as JavaScript. If you’re not confident in your ability to implement changes with GTM, your SEO company can help you achieve this. GTM is particularly useful for ecommerce websites with multiple products and categories.

How Effective Is This?

It’s important to understand that there is still uncertainty as to whether Google, among other search engines, will execute or rather see and index the changes made using GTM. The fact remains that Google doesn’t index and crawl content that is implemented using JavaScript as easy as it does HTML content. However, webmasters all over can show examples of changes made using GTM that were indexed and crawled by Google.

When To Use GTM?

You may use GTM to add a tag that inserts mobile switchboard tags. This is especially useful if you have a mobile site that has the same URL structure. It works by replacing the www with an “m” at the front of the URL. You may also use GTM to add noindex tag which will automatically eliminate existing meta robots tag. This tag can be used when you want to hide products that are out of stock in a particular element on the page.

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