Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
Creating new content vs. optimizing old webpages: Which is better for SEO?
This article tackles a very excellent question, and one that we suspect many website owners don’t know the correct answer to.
As our Mildura web design team love to remind our clients, newer isn’t always better! The fact is, Google’s algorithm takes into account a website’s age when determining search rankings. Thus, older content can often have an easier time ranking for a keyword than a brand new piece of content can.
More imperatively, if you have a page of your website that is already ranking highly for a keyword, your time is much better spent optimising that page than any other page, or creating new content. Why? Because the return you get by moving from, say, #5 to #2 in search rankings and appearing near the top of page 1 of Google, is MUCH better than what you get moving from not ranking at all to #50 with a brand new piece of content.
How to migrate to Google Analytics 4: A step-by-step guide
In case you missed it: Google Analytics has rolled out a new, updated version called Google Analytics 4.
What does this mean for you? Well, if you’ve been using Google Analytics for more than a year, you likely have the old version, Universal Analytics (GA 3). And unlike mobile phone apps, Google Analytics won’t automatically update for you so you’ll have to do the migration yourself.
Don’t worry, though – you have until July 1, 2023 to move over to the new GA. You can do it yourself by following the step-by-step instructions in this article: mostly you’ll just need to create a GA4 property and add the embed code to your website. You can have both GA3 and GA4 collecting data at the same time if you’re not ready to let go of GA3 yet.
Alternatively, if you’ve already hired a digital marketing agency or SEO expert, you can just ask them to take care of this Google Analytics migration for you.
5 Ways To Check If Google Analytics Is Working
Speaking of migrating Google Analytics – if you want to make sure you’ve done it correctly, this article will help you figure it out so that you can be confident that your website metrics are correctly being tracked with GA4.
Tips include checking to see if multiple instances of the tracking code are running on your site (this will mess up your numbers!), checking in Google Analytics to see if visits are getting logged, and using Chrome Developer Tools to check which scripts are running in your browser.