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New Year’s Website Resolutions: January Tune-Ups That Pay Off All Year

An agenda open on a desk with "Happy New Year!" written on the middle of the right page in black ink. A black pen sits next to the agenda.

A new year often encourages many of us to reflect and make some kind of positive change, whether it’s to exercise more regularly, give ourselves more time for that hobby, learn a new skill, or stick to just one coffee in the morning. The annual changeover is also a great time to revitalize your website with the same kind of review and care. These January tune-ups can help maintain your website and will pay off all year.

Maintaining Website Functionality

New year website maintenance is an excellent chance to ensure your website’s general functionality. You want to make sure your website works properly to give the best impression to potential clients and customers. A dysfunctional website could send the opposite message. Here are some simple but effective January tune-ups for to ensure your website’s functionality:

  • Pages and their assets load: Every webpage loading with all its assets is essential functionality. Ensuring pages, text, images, videos, etc. load correctly by browsing through each page is an excellent way to ensure functionality for the new year.
  • Keeping things speedy: Along with everything loading correctly on your website, everything should also load quickly. Websites that take longer to load easily lose their visitors and are deprioritized in search results. Google has an easy tool that can help you check your website’s speed. One effective way to reduce load times is to optimize your image sizes, since bigger images take longer to download.
  • Check for broken links: The internet is not as stable as we’d like to think. Links regularly change, meaning old hyperlinks may suddenly lead nowhere. These could be links leading to other pages on your site or those leading to other websites. The latter group are especially likely to become broken as other websites remove pages or redesign their page structure. These broken links could frustrate users trying to navigate your site or create the wrong impression. Various tools can help parse through your website to ensure links aren’t broken.

 

Tuning Accessibility

Besides maintaining and tuning up general functionality for the new year, you should also review your website’s accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement for any business with more than 50 employees in Ontario, and also a best practice since it allows the most people to use your website. Website accessibility is also not a “one and done” process, because the standards are continuously being revised and updated. While expert web designers will be most familiar with these best practices, there are also some you can begin to review this January:

  • Good alt-text on every image: Alt-text helps those with difficulty seeing get a better sense of what is being displayed in an image or graphic. This is essential for users to fully grasp what a page might be communicating, because otherwise a screen reader simply reads the image’s file name. Every image should have alt-text that accurately and fully describes its content. For example, include all objects and quote any text and its placement in the image.
  • Accessible font-choice: You want to ensure your website’s font is readable for all users to ensure maximum accessibility. This includes considering both the type of font and its size.
  • Colourblind friendly: Colourblindness is quite common and so is a key concern in website accessibility. If a graphic uses reds and greens, it may be indiscernible to someone with red-green colour deficiency. Using tools that visualize colourblindess can help identify potential issues on the website.

Checking Your Website’s Security

Another important maintenance routine that will prevent headaches throughout 2026 is to ensure your website is secure. There are few simple checks to perform in January that will help keep pesky hackers and malicious software from breaching your site:

  • Update, Update, Update: Keep your website and all of its plug-ins up to date. Older versions can leave security vulnerabilities that will leave your website vulnerable.
  • reCAPTCHA: A particular plug-in we want to highlight is Google’s reCaptcha. This service helps to keep your website secure from bots that can destabilize your website.
  • Checking for HTTPS: It is best practice today that websites use the HTTPS protocol to keep their pages more secure for their users. Reviewing settings can help to ensure this is being done.

 

Content Review

Some other new year’s maintenance that can take more time and effort is a content review of your site. This takes more time because it means looking through all the information provided on your site. This review helps to ensure information is up to date, such as your address or services/products provided. It also helps to identify outdated or now irrelevant information which no longer applies and could confuse visitors. These updates also improve your website’s SEO, since search engines review when web pages were last updated.

January Tune-Ups Pay Off All Year

Now you should have a good sense of the simple January maintenance that will set you up for a smooth new year. Various plug-ins and tools can help you perform any of these tune-ups, although content review or a formal website audit will require some more specialized knowledge and input. Either way, Rosewood Marketing’s web team will happily review and implement these tools or more generally assist with website tune-ups. If you’re interested in more comprehensive maintenance or a complete audit, our team is ready and happy to help you fully prepare for 2026.

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Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing

A person presenting a gift with holiday themed wrapping.

The holidays are always a busy season, and not just because of all the family occasions. The holiday season is also important for every business as eager shoppers and clients look to check friends and family members off their lists (plus a little for themselves). To get ahead, businesses need to carefully plan and execute on their digital marketing. However, that takes a lot of attention, energy, and effort while other parts of a business are also demanding more attention for the busy season. You also can’t just abandon that marketing either. We explain why holiday marketing is important in 2025 and why you should leave DIY to festive crafts

The Importance of Marketing in Holidays 2025

Holiday marketing should always be a key part of a business’ annual strategy, but that’s even more true for the holiday season in 2025. It’s relatively obvious that this year has had some economic constraints, which has led to many customers and clients being a little more mindful with their spending. That will be the same going into the holiday season, where Canadians are projected to spend an average  $1,675 on gifts, entertainment, and travel. While an increase from 2023, this is notably 10% less than last year and 81% of Canadians said they were cutting back to save money.

This means that businesses need to be focusing their effort to convince customers and clients that they are worth their dollars. That can only be accomplished with sound marketing that reaches those potential clients and customers. Marketing of this kind takes strategy, creative asset creation, and digital account management, which in turn takes a lot of effort and expertise.

Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing – The Benefits of Outsourcing

All that effort and expertise, and the importance of holiday marketing in 2025 is exactly why businesses should outsource their marketing to an agency. There are numerous benefits this yields for a business, especially during this busy season:

  • Expertise: Outsourcing to a marketing team means getting access for a full team of marketing experts rather than needing to hire your own staff. This ultimately saves costs while ensuring you receive a team of knowledgeable experts that are effective for your holiday marketing.
  • A clear digital strategy: All those experts specialize in specific marketing channels. Together they can create a comprehensive and clear marketing strategy for the holidays which they know will work for your business and audience much more efficiently than non-experts trying to devise something that might work.
  • Active social media and reaching inboxes: Social media management is yet another huge responsibility. Between answering a flood of messages and comments and finding the time to network and connect with other accounts, it consumes valuable time that could be spent on other aspects of your business. However, those connections are a vital part of social media marketing. Similarly, email newsletters are a great way to maintain customer connection, but they can take a lot of time and energy to create. By outsourcing to an agency, you allow an expert team to manage these and keep your digital marketing active.
  • Focus on your business: This is one of the biggest ones. Outsourcing to an agency always helps a business with capacity concerns. Rather than dedicating team members to marketing efforts, a business gets the more efficient time and energy of a team of marketing experts who will accomplish more in less time. That is even more important during the holidays when you and your team need to focus on the business and your clients. Plus, you can all get time to enjoy the holidays with friends and families!
  • Retention Post-Holiday Sales: The holiday season generates an enormous volume of new leads and first-time customers, but this is where many businesses slip back into DIY marketing mode, treating it as a one-and-done event. An expert marketing agency views the 2025 holiday marketing period not just as a sales blitz, but as a long-term customer acquisition strategy. They implement a robust post-holiday strategy designed to convert those one-time shoppers and gift recipients into loyal, year-round clients. This crucial next step involves sophisticated audience segmentation, timely email campaigns (since email remains a high-ROI channel), and targeted social retargeting to maximize the long-term value of every customer acquired. By choosing to outsource marketing, you ensure that your business avoids the January slump and capitalizes on your biggest sales period, making your marketing Christmas investment truly pay off.

Leave DIY to the Christmas and Holiday Crafts

You should now have a sense of the general benefits of outsourcing your marketing agency along with the particular benefits for the upcoming holiday season. It isn’t too late to start strategizing and getting your marketing going, whether it’s your social media, email, ads, or any other digital marketing. Just like your holiday shopping, you shouldn’t leave it to the last minute. So contact the experts at Rosewood Marketing.

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Google Ads is Updating its Healthcare and Medicine Policy in 2025

A doctor holding a tablet with a patient, thematically related to recent updates by Google Ads for its Healthcare and Medicine policy

Google Ads regularly publishes updates and changes to its many policies. Some of these changes are minor or extremely specific with little effect on most advertisers. Others can be more serious, such as the recent updates by Google to its Healthcare and Medicines policy in July and August 2025. We’ll explain what these recent changes mean, who they affect, and what you may need to do.

What is Google Ad’s Update to its Healthcare and Medicines policy?

At the start of August 2025, Google published a notice that it would be updating its enforcement of the Google Ads Healthcare and Medicines policy. The update stated, “The Restricted Medical Content label, which enables eligible certified advertisers to target prescription drug keywords, will be deprecated.” This label was essential for any advertising products or services with ads that targeted prescription drug keywords.

The update means that Google Ads will no longer be using this label. However, ads targeting prescription drug keywords will still be permitted on the platform. Furthermore, since the label is being deprecated, advertisers will still see it as an available option. However, its deprecation means that Google won’t be internally looking at the label for enforcing its policies around Restricted Drug Terms. In summary, the update means advertisers will simply no longer need to use the “Restricted Medical Content” label on their ads targeting these prescription keywords. Instead, Google will now use its certification system to allow advertisers to target prescription drug keywords.

What is Google Ads’ Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification?

In July 2025, Google launched a new certification application for advertisers in Canada, as well as the United States and New Zealand, who plan to use Google’s personalized targeting tools to advertise products or services that contain Restricted Drug Terms. Restricted Drug Terms are defined by Google as “prescription medications and information about prescription medications” excluding those that are not prone to abuse/misuse or are strictly for animals. These, by law, cannot normally be generally advertised for personal use. However, prescription medications can be advertised to healthcare professionals in their capacity as medical professionals.

This is where Google Ads’ personalization is potent, since it allows advertisers of these Restricted Drug Terms to specifically target medical professionals. Previously, Google relied on the label to enforce these restrictions. Instead, advertisers will now need to apply and obtain the Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification. Once received, they can begin running campaigns with Restricted Drug Terms targeted at medical professionals.

Who is Affected by the Changes to Google Ads Medical and Healthcare policies?

The simple answer is anyone targeting restricted drug keywords, i.e. prescription drugs, on Google Ads is affected by the July and August updates. They need to apply for the certification whether they already have campaigns running on the platform or plan to in the coming months. It is best to apply as soon as possible to avoid any disruptions or delays in advertising campaigns on Google. Your marketing agency, like Rosewood Marketing, can apply on your behalf, but they will need a letter authorizing the application. This letter follows a specific format set by Google. Be sure to provide your marketing agency with this letter so that they can apply on your behalf and continue to manage and run your campaigns.

Staying Updated with Google Ads

Now you should have a better idea of the recent changes by Google Ads in its Healthcare and Medicines policy. As mentioned, we recommend applying for the Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification as soon as possible or providing us with the letter so that we can apply on your behalf. If you’re interested in starting new Google Ads campaigns in this industry, contact our Google ads team, who will be more than happy to lend their expertise.

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