Scorpion Legal Marketing

Scorpion Design Review For Lawyers

Scorpion Internet Marketing (aka Scorpion Design) is a full-service digital marketing agency that serves multiple industries, including legal, healthcare, franchises, home services, and small businesses. 

According to its website, in addition to law firms, its clientele includes Smoothie King, Wing Zone, SportClips, The Cleaning Authority, Sunshine Plumbing, Eco Plumbers, Bloomin’ Blinds, and St. Joseph Hospital. In fact, Scorpion has been ranked the number “#1 Franchise Marketing Supplier” two years in a row. Scorpion also sells websites, online legal marketing, and paid online advertising to attorneys. 

A review of its website shows that Scorpion was founded in 2001 and has offices in California, Texas, and New York. It manages a huge amount of pay-per-click ads, qualifying the company as a Google Premier Partner. In 2018 it reported $253.9M in revenue and 653 employees to the “Inc 5000” competition. This amount is up significantly from the $26.1M it reported in 2014. As of April 2019, Scorpion’s website states that it has 10,000+ clients.

Scorpion vs. FindLaw and Internet Brands (aka Avvo and Martindale)

For law firms that are not cost-sensitive, don’t mind spending heavily on pay-per-click ads, have large online marketing budgets and want to turn over control of their marketing to an agency, we think Scorpion is a better bet compared to agency market leaders FindLaw and Internet Brands (which owns Avvo, Martindale, Nolo, Lawyers.com, and others). 

There are two reasons for this opinion.

Scorpion has invested in building its own website technology, while the others sell WordPress websites. WordPress is free, open-source, general-purpose website software. Unlike marketing agencies that use WordPress, you can rest assured that you won’t be sold a modified WordPress template and a bunch of unnecessary maintenance if you’re with Scorpion. For more details on why attorneys should be cautious about WordPress, read our discussion about WordPress for lawyers.

There are plenty of internet marketing companies that are willing to accept significant sums of cash from law firms. If your firm is planning on spending a lot of money each year on a marketing agency, and you are willing to accept the limitations and compromises of working with an agency, Scorpion offers one additional advantage over the other two big players, Findlaw and Internet Brands. In addition to the WordPress factor, the other significant advantage of Scorpion Legal Websites vs. Findlaw Law Firm Websites and of Scorpion vs. Martindale or Avvo Law Firm Website is that Scorpion does not own a legal directory business. 

This is material because it means that, unlike the other two, Scorpion does not compete directly with the websites owned by its law firm clients. For further information on this material conflict of interest that Scorpion avoids, see our guidelines to protect attorneys who do business with online legal directories, and our reviews of FindLaw and Internet Brands.

If you’re set on using a marketing agency, if you’re willing to spend significant money on pay-per-click ads, and if you have the budget to support it over the long-term, Scorpion is worth considering. On the other hand, if you’re exploring alternatives to Scorpion Design, the next part of this article will explain the fundamental differences between Scorpion and our platform in terms of organization, technology, deliverables, and costs.

What types of lawyers and law firms are a good match for websites with Scorpion versus LawLytics?

Based on hundreds of conversations with Scorpion customers and former customers, we believe that Scorpion is an option worth considering for law firms that:

1. Have very large marketing budgets; and 
2. Can commit to increased spending to remain competitive; and
3. Are comfortable spending significant amounts on pay-per-click ads; and
4. Like the idea of delegating control to an agency.

 On the other hand, we believe we are a better fit for law firms that:

1. Want to contain their costs to maintain healthy operating margins; and
2. Want to be in control of their website; and
3. Want to build their website into a long-term revenue-producing asset; and
4. Do not want to become dependent on PPC advertising.

Review of Scorpion’s website technology vs. our technology as each applies to lawyers’ websites

Like us, Scorpion Web Design built its own website marketing technology. At the core of both technologies is a content management system (CMS), which manages websites.

Scorpion’s technology is called “CMS 8” and our technology is called “LawLytics.” Both systems are capable of hosting beautiful websites. Both systems are capable of providing analytics and reporting.

Where the technologies diverge is in their purpose and focus. Our technology is built exclusively for law firms, while the Scorpion CMS must work for all of the business types that Scorpion serves.

Lawyers have unique marketing needs. Marketing a law practice is different than marketing a plumbing business or a food or haircut franchise. 

Businesses in some industries can thrive indefinitely using paid ads to bring people to their websites. Some businesses can rely on catchy marketing copy and flashy graphics because they sell things that are purchased with low risk and low impact decisions that consumers can make on the fly. Haircuts are cheap, and bad ones grow back. What causes a consumer to buy a haircut will not cause him to hire an estate planning lawyer.

Our technology is built exclusively to address the business realities of small law firms and solo practitioners. It is not limited by a need to work for any other type of business. This focus enables us to build, maintain, and evolve our technology in a way that is optimal for law firm owners, without having to compromise.

Google distinguishes between low and high-impact decisions, such as getting a haircut versus hiring a lawyer. The search engine treats legal websites and ads for lawyers differently than it treats most consumer goods and services. 

Legal search terms are extremely expensive to buy (see below for more on PPC ads for lawyers and a review of Scorpion’s legal marketing strategies vs. ours). Therefore, a legal-specific approach is necessary for online legal marketing. Our technology is built to leverage best practices for lawyers, making it easy for lawyers to participate effectively in their firm’s marketing.

Solo practitioners and small law firms can compete effectively with bigger and better-funded competitors when they build smarter practices that leverage the right systems. The best software does this while preventing small firm lawyers from overextending their budgets. The best law firm software in each class works and plays well (and often natively integrates) with other law firm technology.

We specialize in legal software that is optimized to grow sustainable and efficient law practices. Our technology provides integrations with some of the leading law firm management technology, including Clio and Practice Panther, for a seamless experience for attorneys and their clients.

Review of Scorpion’s legal marketing strategy and how it compares to ours

In addition to differences in technology focus, we believe that there are fundamental differences between Scorpion’s business model and ours.

These differences inform the strategies each company utilizes on behalf of law firms. The points of deviation between the companies are most evident in their approaches to:

1. The role that pay-per-click ads (PPC) should play in driving traffic to a law firm’s website.
2. The balance between search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC.
3. The approach to law firm website design.

We will review each of these in turn. But before we do, let’s quickly review the commonalities. Reviewing Scorpion Design’s website and having conversations with Scorpion Marketing’s customers and former customers over the past eight years, we believe that we share the following beliefs:

• The law firm’s website should be the centerpiece of the firm’s online marketing.
• Technology innovation is important.
• Design and user experience are important.
• Responsive design provides the best user experience.
• Law firm websites should be secure.
• Websites should be search engine friendly.
• Each page should have clear and easy-to-understand calls to action.
• Reporting and analytics are important.

All of the above are “table stakes” when it comes to online legal marketing, and both companies provide attorneys with these essentials.

If you’re an attorney trying to decide between LawLytics and Scorpion Marketing, let’s examine the three critical points of difference.

Review of Scorpion Design’s stance on PPC ads as compared to ours.

The two companies differ fundamentally when it comes to how much solos and small firms should be spending on their marketing, and what they should be spending it on.

The biggest difference involves the purchase of pay-per-click ads to bring traffic and potential clients to the law firm’s website. (This is referred to as SEM, which stands for “search engine marketing”.)  

Unlike free search engine traffic (called “organic” traffic), SEM displays search results marked as ads. The law firm pays each time one of their ads is clicked.

Scorpion produces significant revenue selling pay-per-click ads that bring visitors directly to the websites owned by its clients. Conversely, we eschew selling pay-per-click ads in favor of helping attorneys avoid becoming dependent on pay-per-click ads to support their websites. 

PPC ads, when used to drive traffic to a law firm’s websites, are often very expensive. They cannot build lasting value because once someone clicks on the ad, the money is gone forever. But PPC ads can and often do create dependence on continued spending as well as vulnerability to competitors.

Scorpion is a viable choice for attorneys who are convinced that significant spending on pay-per-click advertising is the best source of traffic for their websites and who don’t mind paying management fees on top of the cost of the ads. While attorneys may pay a premium for Scorpion’s services as compared to some PPC provider alternatives, they’ll do so knowing that they are working with an established company. 

Attorneys who adopt a PPC-based strategy for their firm’s website should be prepared to increase their ad spend over time as competitive bids increase. This is true whether the attorney buys ads through Scorpion Design, through another agency, or directly from Google. Attorneys who adopt a PPC-based strategy should budget for sudden and reactive increases in ad budget as new and existing competitive bidders drive up the cost of client acquisition.

For attorneys who are not sure about PPC, but who want to keep the door open without going all-in, we have cultivated a network of strategic, ethical and reasonably priced PPC partners that provide exclusive discounts to our members, and follow our law firm PPC Guidelines (designed to protect law firms). This empowers our members to safely experiment with pay-per-click while building highly profitable and enduring client acquisition assets using our sustainable organic content-based SEO strategy. 

Review of Scorpion’s marketing stance on the balance of SEO and PPC as compared to our marketing stance

Both companies acknowledge the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). Having effective SEO means that your law firm’s website predictably attracts and converts potential clients via free search engine traffic. For a deeper understanding of SEO, and to learn what attorneys should and should not do, see the Lawyers’ Guide To Law Firm SEO.

When done according to Google’s content-focused guidelines, SEO is the most cost-effective and sustainable way to drive potential clients directly to a law firm’s website. With the right investment of either time or money, it produces more highly qualified potential clients than pay-per-click.

A review of Scorpion’s website reveals that it recommends a “healthy balance” between SEO and pay-per-click to drive traffic to business websites. We disagree with the “healthy balance” approach because we believe, for most lawyers, there is no safe long-term balance between SEO and pay-per-click as co-existing channels of traffic to a law firm’s website. 

Instead, we believe that solo practitioners and small law firm owners should strive to minimize (and ideally, to completely avoid) using pay-per-click ads to drive traffic to their law firm’s website. We believe attorneys should focus as much as possible on the content-based SEO strategy preferred by search engines.

Scorpion’s “healthy balance” approach may work well over time for franchises, plumbers, and other non-legal service providers that sell transactional and low-impact goods and services. But the math of pay-per-click economics may preclude it as a viable source of traffic for the websites of many solos and small law firms in many jurisdictions.

The high cost for each click, the wasted money from non-qualified clicks, and the vulnerability to unexpected and aggressive bidding wars converge to make it difficult for most law firms to achieve lasting marketing stability while attempting to balance PPC and SEO for traffic directly to their websites. 

We believe that reliance on such a strategy renders the firm’s cost per client acquisition and, therefore, marketing viability perpetually vulnerable on the PPC side. Furthermore, we believe that the diluted content-based SEO effort is highly likely to disadvantage the firm’s ability to compete without continued PPC spend, thus perpetuating the law firm’s reliance on PPC.

For solos and small firms that need to watch their marketing expenses, shooting for a “healthy balance” may set a law firm up to fail. Taking a “healthy balance” approach may preclude sufficient investment in sustainable content-based SEO. The potential exception would be for law firms that choose to spend money on PPC ads while simultaneously investing effort into writing a large amount of their website’s content.

After reviewing Scorpion’s website, it is not clear what a “healthy balance” means in terms of dollars spent on PPC vs. dollars invested in SEO. But for some jurisdictions and practice areas, a “healthy balance” likely means spending a lot of money. To illustrate, let’s look at a few examples:

Let’s say you’re a DUI attorney in Seattle. According to SEMRush, as of this writing, you would expect to pay the following:

• $75.68 per click for searches for “Seattle DUI attorney”
• $97.56 per click for “best DUI attorney Seattle”

Taking the average value of $86.62 per click, that means that an attorney reliant on bidding for these types of phrases would spend $1,000 for every 11.54 clicks. 

Let’s say that the firm set a $1,000 per day budget to drive traffic to its website. The daily $1,000 PPC budget could get consumed, and the ads disappeared for the day, before noon under the following scenario:

• Three current or former clients click on the firm’s ad because that’s how they found the firm in the first place and that’s how they think about going to the firm’s website; and
• Three competitors of the firm click on the ad;
• Two solicitors who see that you’re spending big bucks on ads and want a piece of your action click on the ad (and later cold call the firm);
• Three actual DUI defendants click on the ad, but two are public defender clients, and one already has representation.

These 11 clicks would cost the firm roughly $1,000, exclusive of any applicable PPC management fees, but produce no revenue for the law firm. Multiply that by a whole month, and the math gets scary for most solos and small firms.

Here are the prices for similar clicks in Los Angeles:

• $98.90 per click for searches for “Los Angeles DUI attorney”; and
• $145.50 for “best DUI attorney Los Angeles”

And for Phoenix:

• $124.71 for “Phoenix DUI attorney”; and
• $119.87 for “DUI attorney Phoenix AZ”

For other areas of practice and other jurisdictions, it’s even steeper. We’ve seen average bids of upwards of $200 per click for personal injury, medical malpractice, and mass torts related keywords.

Determining how far your money will go by conducting a review of your Scorpion ad spend vs. your investment in content-based SEO

If you are a small law firm owner or solo practitioner and you’re trying to quantify whether Scorpion is a good fit, we recommend reviewing your budget and mapping out what it will buy you. 

Having clarity as to the purpose of the monthly checks you’ll write will shed light on whether Scorpion Design is the best match for your law firm’s website.

How much does Scorpion marketing cost?

Parts of your payment to Scorpion may go to pay-per-click ad spend (and parts to pay-per-click ad-management fees or commissions). Other parts of your payment may go to building and designing your law firm’s website, updating the website, maintaining the website, creating content, and assorted other things that Scorpion may classify as SEO.

Looking at small periods of time (months or quarters) can obscure reality and cause attorneys to underestimate the “time-value” or “compounding power” of content creation. For that reason, we recommend doing the math and translating it from months to quarters, and then to one, two, and three year periods. 

This will help you assess not only how much money you are spending or going to spend with Scorpion Marketing, but the portion that is an investment (in content) versus the portion that is an expense (in ad spend and PPC management fees). 

In other words, after your check has cleared the bank and the month is over, how much of the money that you paid was allocated to the creation of high-quality content that was added to your firm’s website? 

We recommend thinking about this in terms of words added, rather than pages or blog posts added, because pages and posts vary in length, while words are fungible.

We recommend breaking your spend down into the following categories:

• True PPC costs: How much money are you spending directly on ads? This amount is the money that goes to Google, Bing, and any other ad providers to pay for the clicks attributed to your firm.
• PPC management fees: How much are you paying Scorpion to manage your PPC ads? Is it a percentage of your total ad spend? Is it calculated based on the net amounts paid to Google and others? Or is it extracted from your budget first, and the remaining amount is then made available to spend on Google? 
• Technology costs: How much of your budget with Scorpion is earmarked towards hosting, updating technology, accessing their technology, and maintaining your site in good working order? In other words, if you wanted to strip your Scorpion account down to just these things, would you have the option to do that, and what would your monthly bill be? 
• Support costs: How much of your budget with Scorpion goes towards support, strategy, and advice? What if you wanted only this plus the things mentioned in “technology costs” directly above?
• Content creation: How much of your budget with Scorpion Design is earmarked for the creation of original content for your law firm’s website or blog? How much content do you get for that? Again, it’s helpful to break it down into words published per month. Blog posts and pages can be of variable size, so simply getting a blog or page count is not sufficient to know what you’re getting.
• Non-content related SEO: How much of your law firm’s monthly budget with Scorpion is to be applied to search engine optimization efforts outside of creating content? This amount may include on-site optimization and cleanup. It may also include off-site activities such as link-building and social media posts. (To better understand the true value of such services, see our law firm SEO primer).
• Website design and design changes: How much of your initial budget will go to the original website design with Scorpion? How much of your monthly budget will go towards design changes?

Armed with an itemized breakdown of how your payment is allocated, you’ll be able to forecast months and years into the future. You’ll know if, and to what extent, you’ll own a sustainable law firm website once the payments have cleared.

Review of Scorpion Marketing’s law firm website designs vs. our designs

A review of Scorpion Design’s page on law firm website design reveals that the company believes attorney websites should be beautiful and professional looking. We agree. In fact, with both companies, you’re going to get a professionally designed website. Both companies use the following best practices:

1. Beautiful designs. Your website is the first impression that potential clients will form about your firm, and both companies excel at creating websites that make the right impression.
2. Responsive designs. Responsive design technology ensures that websites are viewable with full access to the firm’s content on all device types and sizes.
3. Easy contact methods. Calls to action to contact the firm, along with touch-enabled phone numbers, are placed in optimal locations to catch your potential clients’ eyes without getting in the way.
4. Horizontal navigation. Legal websites should have intuitively located horizontal top-level navigation. This type of navigation is what most potential clients expect, and it makes it easy for them to locate the resources they are looking for.
5. Appropriately sized fonts and images. Fonts on a law firm website should not be so small that they are difficult to read or understand. Nor should they be so large that they look goofy. (Some WordPress designers have recently started using oversized fonts on law firm websites, which is not a good idea.) Similarly, images on a law firm website should be crisp and easily understood, but should not overwhelm or take away from the readability of the content. Both companies strike a healthy balance in the sizing of both of these important items.

We believe that most Scorpion legal websites offer well-designed experiences that make law firms look good. But, the one place where we diverge is in the way Scorpion approaches some animations and style elements.

Many of the Scorpion websites we reviewed contained motion graphics. We believe these motion graphics are potentially counterproductive on law firm websites. They can distract potential clients and make it more difficult for them to find and absorb information on a law firm’s website. Some examples that we’ve seen in the past include sub-menus that take over the entire screen or that dramatically slide in from the top. We’ve also seen Scorpion sites in which sub-menu items inexplicably have arrows that appear and point away from the item when someone hovers over the item.

We take a “simpler is better” approach to law firm website design because there’s a simple formula that works. We know how potential clients and referral sources consume information on legal websites. We know how they decide to contact and hire a law firm. That science is baked into all our designs, so attorneys don’t have to worry about the design elements of a high-converting website.

Conclusion

If you’re willing to spend the money and if you’re comfortable handing over control of your firm’s future to a marketing agency, then you might be a good fit for Scorpion. 

On the other hand, if you want to spend less money and easily control and understand your website with software built exclusively for lawyers, then LawLytics is likely to provide you with a better experience and better long-term ROI.

Comparing Budgets and Benefits

We invite you to compare what you will get with LawLytics with what you get with Scorpion. Dollar for dollar, at all price points, we’re confident our platform and services compare favorably to Scorpion, and deliver more long-term value, more freedom, more control, and more flexibility for your law firm.

For a quick pricing reference, use our instant price calculator. If you’d like to experience what our platform can do for your law firm, schedule a personalized 20-minute demo.