Litigation

4structures.com, LLC continues to dominate the unique visitors to structured settlement industry websites, according to an anlaysis of Compete.com data for March  2009. The industry itself improved on last month with an average of 1,284 unique visitors. While this represents an improvement from February 2009, the result is misleading because 4structures.com, LLC (with 5,381) once again dominated unique visitors for the structured settlement niche market segment followed by Compete.com with over 59.86% . Note that Compete.com does not appear to follow blogs unless there is a unique URL (as opposed to a sub-domain)

Removing 4structures.com, LLC from the Compete.com ranked settlement industry websites to avoid a skew of the results, drops the average by more than 50% to only 601.17 unique visitors .

As I've stated for the last three months, 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  who are reasonably presumed to visit their company website at least once per month.

Though way down from an April 2008 high of 160,000 unique visitors, cash now pusher JG Wentworth had over 54,409 unique visitors in March 2009 AND the key words " structured settlement" and "structured settlement payout San Diego" and "annuity" were the 2nd, 4th and 5th most significant key words driving its unique visitors.  Other factoring companies such as "cash now pushers" Novation Capital, Prosperity Partners, Imperial Structured Settlements are crushing most of the structured settlement industry websites from a unique visitor standpoint. Industry slouches should note that the top key words driving unqiue visitors to Prosperity Partners' site were "structured settlement", "structured settlements", "alternative to structured settlements" and "where can I find a good structured settlement?" In recent months Prosperity recently launched a campaign involving state specific feeder blogs in Texas, New York, Illinois, Maryland , Georgia and Arizona.

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 continuing to drive driving traffic to Ringler's site (according to Compete) is "tour company ratings". The James Street Group STILL seems to get a lot of traffic from people searching for Papa Johns Pizza of Elmhurst Queens (large Pepperoni and a structure please!) , according to Compete.com and the Settlement Professionals Inc.' Oregon operation's top key word driver is Richard B. Risk qualified settlement fund. At least visitors to NSSTA appear to be matched up to what the website can deliver, according to the date retrieved from Compete.com.

Obviously this is all about 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.

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. Even if you have a nice website, if you do little to promote it, where are you?  Water and fertilize your garden to allow it to grow. There is no MiracleGro for the Internet. Don't be a slouch!

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.