DOMAIN NAME SET UP (WEBSITE URL)

The What:
First, we start with the most basic of questions but one of the most important—is your website domain set up correctly? On first glance, you may think that it is, but the fact of the matter is that there are many veterinary pages that are incorrectly set up—meaning they have two versions of the same website out there, living on the internet, competing with each other.

To be more specific, we’ll use the example of a fictional practice called Good Veterinary Hospital—this veterinarian does not have their domain set up correctly. As such, their website can be reached at www.GoodVeterinaryHospital.com as well as at GoodVeterinaryHospital.com (notice the second version does not have www). This is bad—by having two versions of the same website, this causes confusion to search engines like Google, which lowers the value of Good Veterinary Hospital. It’s a simple concept: help Google help you.

Since their value is now lowered, their website will show up less often on search engines, which will hurt their business’ online visibility.

The How:
How to check if your website domain is set up correctly: Type your domain name into your browser’s address bar including the "www." (for example: www. YourHospitalName.com). Once the page loads completely, remove the www. from the address bar and hit return. If your domain reloads and displays without the "www." (as "YourHospitalName.com"), your website is duplicated—this is detrimental. If it reloads with the www. automatically, you are set up correctly. This also works vice versa with the www. redirecting to no www. The important thing is to not have both versions load.

How To Fix This: This one is pretty technical, but extremely easy so talk to your web developer ASAP. If you don’t have one, use this link from NameCheap to set up the DNS record yourself.