Broker Website Ratings Updated for 2010

One of the most popular features on the Industry Radar is our Broker Website Ratings which drew nearly 25,000 page views last year alone.

The survey debuted last year with around 400 firms rated. This year we reviewed nearly double – 775 – and the results are quite interesting.

You can see our rating criteria here.

Ratings are from 1 to 4:

1. Billboard -129 firms (17%) – plain, basic, little to no marketing value
2. Brochureware – 353 firms (46%) – either an online brochure or design is “old” or poorly executed with limited marketing value
3. Basic Website – 252 firms (32%) – design is OK, some content, mostly focused on telling firm’s story
4. Marketing Site – 42 firms (5%) – Creative, visually appealing, online tools, good content

The baseline for a good site of a “3” only applies to about a third of all brokerage firms half are “2” and overall 63% are either a “1” or a “2”.

In 2009 the percentages were 7%/53%/34%/6%. Not a lot of difference for the 2-4’s but as we extended our survey to include smaller firms, i.e, those under $2 million in revenue, NFP, UBA and HRBA members and others the lack of marketing savvy became more apparent with the “1” rankings more than doubling.

One area where there was a big improvement was in firms that could be found when googling “employee benefits their city, their state”.  Last year only 30 were found in the Top 10 in their market, now 246 are, a huge jump helped though to a large degree by the fact that is we found firms in the top 10 in our research, that had a website we added them to our survey.

The fact that we created our webpages and they got nearly 25,ooo hits also helped boost the visibility in general of brokers in general.

Check out this year’s results? How did your firm fare? Has your work over the last year paid off or are you still in the dark ages and viewing your website as not an important component of how prospects and customers view your organization?

We will be blogging more on this over the next week but if you are a “1” or “2” you really need to think about your firm’s image online because prospects and customers use the web as a way to research and “pre shop” for help and if your site isn’t up to snuff you are losing potential business.

In fact our broker website ranking page drew nearly 25,000 page views in the last year of people googling specific firm names, or looking for brokers and ratings in a given geography. So do you still think that you website is not important to your business?

PS – if you would like to be rated or have updated your site since we did our review and would like us to update it please email us here.

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