Litigation

According to a Compete.com analysis for January 2009, the structured settlement industry websites  picked up by Compete.com averaged 839.67 unique visitors. While this represents an improvement from December 2008, the result is misleading because two companies 4structures.com, LLC and Ringler Associates dominated unique visitors for the market segment followed by Compete.com with over 64.38%. Note that Compete.com does not appear to follow blogs unless there is a unique URL (as opposed to a sub-domain)

Removing these top two structured Compete.com ranked settlement industry websites that skew the results, drops the average by more than 50% to only 384.57 unique visitors . This is pathetic!

As I stated last month some structured settlement industry members unique web traffic is so poor that the unique traffic measure is reduced to negligible after you discount the number of people in the company or association who are reasonably presumed to visit their company or association website at least once per month.

Meanwhile cash now pusher JG Wentworth had over 43,819 unique visitors in January 2009 AND the key word " structured settlement" was the 3rd most significant key word driving its unique visitors.  Other factoring companies such as Settlement Capital and "cash now pushers" Novation Capital, Prosperity Partners, Imperial Structured Settlements are crushing most of the structured settlement industry websites from a unique vistor standpoint.

Even if you do have visitors it is always interesting to see what is driving the unique visitor traffic to see if is even relevant to the services provided. For example, one of the top two keywords driving traffic to Ringler's site according to Compete is "tour company ratings". I'm not trying to embarass Ringler, I'm trying to motivate them. Yeah that's right.. motivate one of my competitors AND OTHERS to do a better job (and Ringler is doing a better job than most) for the good of the industry AND towards a goal of improving the likelihood that consumers searching for structured settlements or settlement planning information can get to a legitimate source of information from a service provider who can help them directly with the subject of their query. On the success side, according to the Compete source, Mark Wahlstrom's Settlement Channel got a significant amount of unique visitors from various Vioxx related key words which knowing Mark were carefully targeted.

The unfortunate reality is that there is a segment of hypocrites in the structured settlement industry who have tripped over their own cynicism when it comes to the Internet.  They grumble about the factoring industry, they grumble about what Wahlstrom, Hindert, McNay or I write or produce, or Ringler Radio,  yet they do little themselves (or don't do it consistently). Lord knows I do not agree with the pedant Hindert most of the time (and I'm confident that I am in good company), but at least the man has invested the time to learn something as have I and the others cited.

It's important to have a web presence in today's market.  Your website must look good and contain quality accurate content that is updated regularly.  Thinking you can just slap something together and leave it there, or write one ranting blog post every few months, is just ignorant. It doesn't work.  Water and fertilize your garden to allow it to grow. There is no MiracleGro for the Internet.

Don't be a ghost.

Compete.com claims to have competitive metrics for every site on the web powered by the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry.