5 New Year Resolutions for Digital Marketing Success in 2022

New Year’s Day always brings with it resolutions. As business owners, we often have a set of business resolutions for an upcoming year. But do you include your marketing, and specifically your Digital Marketing? Wherever you are in your digital marketing journey, start it or strengthen it by making sure you have the fundamentals in place and that they are working for you.
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Resolution 1 - Fix Website Issues
Chances are, if you are reading this,  you already have a website for your business. Understanding of what the website needs to be able to do be successful is paramount. Otherwise, you have a website that sits there looking beautiful but not really doing anything beyond because it's in the abyss of the internet. Start With Your Web Host - Speed, Speed, SpeedYour Web Hosting company can be one of the best places to begin analyzing your website. Arguably, since the advent of Google Core Vitals, the role of web hosting now factors into the success of a website’s ranking. Google can and will penalize your website if it is slow. Even with an otherwise perfectly optimized website in place, slow speed will find your site out of the sight of a potential customer's path. So where do you find out how your website scores in core vitals? The answer is simple Web.dev. This Google site is for you to see how your site is doing based on their best practices model. If you check your website speed and it does not pass, this should be one of the first resolutions you should consider as the web development could be better. The next logical question is how to tackle these issues. First let's establish you could do everything else right for core vitals and if your web hosting company is not on board it is all for nothing. So let's get this off the table first. 

What Questions Do You Ask  Your Web Host about Core Vitals?Some considerations to address with a potential web host before signing should be:What kind of web server do you have running? There are several types of web servers. Although Apache is the most common, LiteSpeed Server is far better for SEO goals. They may push back on you and say that's a dedicated server function. Will the webhost set that up for you, or are you on your own to buy the license and install on your own? Vertical Web Includes LiteSpeed Servers as part of all of our WordPress Web Hosting Plans.Do you have compression and caching running on the web server? A web server can be set to compress images and help deliver images quickly. This does require less clients per server and more computing horse power. Again the answer may be dedicated server. Again, will they install it for you? This too is included as a part of all Vertical Web Hosting plans standard. What is the likelihood of the web server becoming overpopulated? This is a hard question to get an answer to. No one is really going to answer that question, but know this, a cheap web hosting plan is a quick indicator of a packed server. The bet is 99% of the people on that web server will never really do much, but if you are serious about marketing, this is not a circumstance you should take a chance with. A dedicated or managed server is a better scenario if you are unsure of the answer. WordPress Installation Considerations for Core VitalsThe other part of the core vital equation is a solid WordPress install. Bloated installs with bad themes and inefficient builders can bog your site down and cause issues. Vertical Web uses a customized install for our Management WordPress Hosting plans. Here are some examples of what to look for when using WordPress:Keeping the WordPress install currentEnsuring plugins are up to dateAvoiding bloated themes not designed to be core vital friendlyHaving the right caching software. We recommend WP Rocket and provide it with our WordPress Hosting plansRunning a speed te...