SEO Titles and Descriptions Recipe for GTM

June 8, 2017

Adds <title> and <meta name="description"> tags to pages on your site for search engines. You will need to adapt the values to reflect your own content.

FAQ: Does it really work to add data for search engines dynamically with JavaScript in GTM?

Google will use this data in its crawls. This was first confirmed by Simo Ahava in the experiments detailed here. Other search engine behavior may vary. This method using GTM is a workaround for enhancing Google search results when other options to edit your site’s source code are not available to you.

Ingredients

Tags

CU - SEO - Meta Description - LunaMetrics Plugin

CU - SEO - Title - LunaMetrics Plugin

Variables

Lookup - SEO Description

Lookup - SEO Title

Instructions

1. Download Container File

Download the container JSON file.

(You may need to right-click on the link and choose “Save Link As” or “Save Target As” to save the JSON file to your computer.)

2. Import JSON File into GTM

Log into your own Google Tag Manager container and head to the Admin section of the site. Under Container options, select Import Container. Check out this blog post for more details about importing a container file.

3. Update With Your Own Titles and Descriptions

Update the variables Lookup – SEO Title and Lookup – SEO Description to reflect the values you would like to use for your pages. These are lookup table variables. In the input column, enter a URL path to a page. In the output column, enter the title or description you would like to use. Titles and descriptions will only be added to the pages you list.

If you have a long list, you can use our quick spreadsheet generator for GTM lookup tables to insert the entries. Alternatively, a solution from SEER Interactive supports flexible matches and can be adapted for use in these tags.

If you only need descriptions and not titles, or vice versa, you can delete the tag and variable you are not using.

4. Preview & Publish

Use the Preview options to test this container on your own site. If everything looks good, go ahead and publish!