What is a Primary Domain?

If you have multiple domain names, you should pick one for your primary domain name. If you only have one, be sure to decide whether your primary domain uses the "www" or not. While your customers may not care, Google will, so this is an important search engine optimization step - and one that you can do yourself for free!

Note: If your insurance agency website is from Banyan Theory, we have already taken care of setting a primary and preferred domain.  But if you have other domain names that we may not know about, be sure to let your Account Manager know.

If your website is not hosted with Banyan Theory - don't worry.  Your web designer should be able to easily take care of these settings for you. 

1. Update all of your domains to redirect to your website

Many people will purchase a bunch of variations of their domain, and then never do anything with them.  Even if you don't plan on ever advertising (for example) the ".net" version of your domain, it's a good idea to point it at your website anyway.  

Note: Having a lot of domains redirecting to your primary domain does NOT help with SEO. In order to take advantage of the SEO benefit of a particular domain name, you have to have unique content at that domain - essentially a completely separate (targeted) website. 

2. Designate one of them to be your primary domain.

Primary domains are important for SEO purposes. You want to be able to tell Google that you have one website, and where it's located.  Otherwise, Google sees each domain that your website is accessible at as just duplicate content, which will keep you from ranking as highly on Google as you otherwise would.

You can check and see if you currently have a primary domain set by going to your website using 2 of your registered domains.  Notice when your website loads, if the domain name you typed is the same as what is displayed.  If when you visit one domain, the browser updates it to another one, then you have a primary domain set.  Your primary domain is the one that is displayed in the browser URL bar once the website has loaded. Just be sure ALL of your non-primary domains behave this way.

3. Choose with or without the "www"

Your domain should also be set to have a preferred domain, which means whether it considers the "www" as part of the primary domain or not. If you don't have this preference set on your domain, Google will see your website as 2 separate websites, which is not helpful for your SEO efforts.

To check and see if this preference is set:

• Type your domain into your browser URL bar using the "www" in front (for example "www.acmeinsurancedallas.com").
• When your website loads, check and see if the "www" is still showing in your browser URL bar.
• Now type in the non-www version ("acmeinsurance.com").
• Once the website finishes loading, check and see if the "www" is showing the browser URL bar.
• If when you visited your website each time the website address showing in the browser URL bar didn't change from what you typed, then you do not have this preference set
• If however it did update, whichever version was showing when the website finished loading is (www vs. non-www) is your preferred domain.

4. Use your email address domain

If you use a different domain name for your email address that isn't a generic email provider (like Gmail or Yahoo), then make sure your customers can access your website using that domain.  If a customer is looking for your website, and only has your email address, this is often the first place they will check.  

For example, if your primary domain is www.acmeinsurancedallas.com, but your email address is jon@acmeins.com, then be sure that if a customer goes to acmeins.com, they are automatically redirected to www.acmeinsurancedallas.com.