If you’re in the legal sector, there is a chance you’ve heard of Scorpion Marketing. They are one of the oldest and largest companies in the digital marketing space for legal firms. But does that make them a good choice for your business?
You might be looking to get started with putting your law firm onto the internet. Or you’re looking to spice up your existing presence by introducing a new website or a new strategy. If that's your aim, there is a good chance that you are considering approaching Scorpion Marketing for web design or internet marketing services.
At that point, the question to ask is whether you will get what you need from Scorpion. In this post, we will attempt to take a fair look at the both the advantages and disadvantages you’ll come across working with Scorpion. Our aim is to provide you with the facts you need to make an educated decision about whether or not you want to go with Scorpion Marketing for your website.
Disclaimer: RankToday is a competitor of Scorpion Marketing, and as such, this review stands a chance of being biased. However, every effort has been taken to make sure that what follows is an honest review of Scorpion Marketing. This is all based on what we know of Scorpion’s products, services and more importantly, their results. This assessment is meant to be from the standpoint of a consumer rather than a competitor.
Table of Contents
There are two major parts to Scorpion’s core services:
We will break down both of these primary services and take a look at how well they suit your needs.
It must be said that Scorpion Marketing is certainly well-suited to creating high quality websites that are well designed. Their website lists the many awards they’ve won for their endeavors. As players in the same field – web design for legal firms – we’ve come across many websites that were designed by Scorpion. In doing so, we’ve seen many that are truly impressive works, both in terms of visual design and functionality.
However, you might feel that Scorpion websites tend to overshoot in terms of visual designs more often than not. We’ve seen many websites that are a tad too extravagant, with bright, in-your-face colors, a high number of large images, and a jumble of shapes and effects.
This, however, tends to be a personal preference. You might actually like designs that incorporate these elements. However, you might also find their designs to be too flashy for your tastes. In the end, the fact of the matter remains that Scorpion is very capable of producing a functioning website. However, the end result might be too gaudy for our tastes.
We’ve looked at Scorpion’s designing skills and decided that they are pretty good. Which leaves the development side of things for us to look at. “Development” in this context refers to the actual process of building the website. This is the part that involves hundreds of lines of bespoke code that go into creating a functional website that suits your needs. Development is the putting together of all the disparate pieces that are part of your vision to output one cohesive website.
While Scorpion manages to create good-looking websites, in our opinion, it fails at the development side of things. “Fail” might be too harsh a word, but their process is certainly not optimized. Due to their image-heavy nature, pagespeed issues are one of the main problems Scorpion has.
As you can see, Scorpion’s website score rather low on Google’s Pagespeed Insights. You can see that it’s even worse for Mobile. While these are numbers for just one website, you can check it for yourself for other Scorpion websites. You will find that Scorpion’s own website only averages around 35 for Mobile devices and 80 for Desktops. RankToday’s website, by comparison, scores 55 for Mobile devices and 85 for Desktops. The numbers fluctuate based on several factors, but RankToday’s company website consistently beats Scorpion’s company website.
In addition to the Pagespeed issue, Scorpion uses a proprietary content management system for the websites they create. This means a lot of inflexibility for your firm.
If you want to switch your website and other digital marketing efforts to a different marketing agency but you still want to retain the website you paid Scorpion to create for you... You might find that your new digital marketing providers might not be able to make any changes or additions for your website because of the proprietary system Scorpion uses. In a manner, this is Scorpion’s way of retaining you as a customer. You will be less inclined to leave if you know you’ll have to create a whole new website and that is good for them.
Here at RankToday, every website is built on WordPress. WordPress is the perfect foundation to build websites for law firms. They are able to serve every possible need and at the same time, are highly customizable. WordPress is also widely supported and incredibly popular. Many popular websites are built with WordPress, including Variety, The New Yorker, the Rolling Stones, among more. WordPress is also built to be incredible SEO friendly, content publishing is very easy and it is also user-friendly, even to those with little to no coding or HTML knowledge.
The point we’re trying to make is that there is no particular reason Scorpion needs to use a proprietary system when there are incredibly complex yet accessible systems that can be used instead. Only reason we can think of is that which we pointed out earlier: a website built on a proprietary content management system more or less locks you in with them.
One more thing to consider is that several websites made by Scorpion that we checked out were not optimized for mobile display, at all. More often than not, what we encountered was a jumbled mess that took a long time to load and when it finally did load, did not display properly. In a world that is becoming incredibly mobile, websites that are not optimized for mobile devices are a backwards thing. For the prices Scorpion's Web Design asks for, it is not too much to ask for a website that is optimized for display on mobile devices.
That leads us to the final point to address about Scorpion Design: their pricing for their web design and development. They are a longstanding agency with good reputation. You should, rightfully, expect their prices to be on the higher end of things. We’ve heard from other lawyers that the quotes they received quotes ranging anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 for a custom designed website. Scorpion also has similar prices for continuous monthly services.
It must also be said that Scorpion seems to offer websites based on pre-made templates that go for around ~$2,000. These websites are obviously not as complex as a custom made one would be. On the upside, they could be launched quickly and at a low cost. As to their quality? That is questionable.
RankToday, on the other hand, was created with the intention of providing the best services at the lowest price we can afford. A complete custom website, designed and developed by RankToday will only set you back around $3,000. If you are opting for a continuous development package, the prices will vary based on the monthly services you want.
In addition to web design and development, the other major part of digital marketing is Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to by its abbreviation: SEO. If you’ve read this far into a Scorpion review, you’re obviously interested in what their SEO capabilities are like.
Sadly, it seems we might not have many positives to say on that matter. In addition to speaking with clients and potential clients of Scorpion, we also did some research of our own on websites designed by the company. What we found is that Scorpion seems to cast aside organic SEO and focus on paid search methods like Google AdWords, social media marketing etc.
The problem with this is that paid search methods only work as long as you’re paying. On the other hand, with the right effort, a well-optimized website could organically grow in it’s search engine ranking overtime. You will not need to keep investing a lot of money in it over time.
We have no doubt that Scorpion has SEO professionals on hand who are able to fine tune a website for maximum organic growth, however, what we believe is that Scorpion is applying the same level of effort to all their clients.
We believe that Scorpion performs thorough SEO campaigns, incorporation local SEO, extensive backlinks, content marketing, custom HTML and more… but just for their highest paying clients. For the firms that that have significantly lower budgets, it is possible that Scorpion is choosing to prioritize profit and go for paid ads and search results rather than work on hands-on SEO methods.
At RankToday, we’ve worked with SEO for a long time and we know that it is hard and time-consuming. You can't take shortcuts with SEO. Not if you want good results. But we also know that for the best results for our clients, we need to apply the all our efforts in providing hands-on organic SEO. All of RankToday’s SEO packages provide this, with no hidden costs.
We are clearly on the side of building SEO via organic methods over paid ones. However, we would be stupid to dismiss the power of paid advertising. By integrating both of these methods, you stand to gain great results.
While we don’t have firsthand knowledge of how Scorpion’s paid advertising methods work, we can still infer certain things. For one, it must be at least above average from the fact that their clients manage to rank well in searches, both organic and paid.
However, some of Scorpion’s clients we’ve talked to express dissatisfaction with the results they’ve seen. For them, the PPC methods offered by Scorpion are not providing the level of results that they need, especially in their respective areas of practice. From what we’ve gathered, Scorpion Design’s PPC methods aren’t very effective, especially for highly competitive areas of practice.
In addition, the clients RankToday talked to also mentioned that they were drawn in with low up-front costs and then hit with high monthly costs for additional paid search advertising. From a consumer’s standpoint, hidden costs like these are terrible.
RankToday’s paid advertising is integrated with our SEO services and it’s costs are not hidden from you. We offer a number of packages, and along with the prices for them, you will always know exactly what you are getting.
Scorpion has been doing what it’s doing for a long while, unlike the many smaller startups or mid-level companies like RankToday. They are well-established, they’ve cemented their reputation in the industry for digital marketing for lawyers, and because of their age and their expansive size, they have substantial resources at hand.
They also have a lot of happy clients who are completely satisfied with the services provided by Scorpion, and they do provide excellent services. Their websites are well-made and perfectly functional, despite being a bit too flashy and gaudy for our tastes. The websites also work as intended, despite having pagespeed issues. However, most of their websites seem rather terribly optimized for mobile devices.
In addition, it might be that Scorpion is focusing on paid search advertising instead of the superior organic search. Or at least, it seems they do this for their lower level customers. At RankToday, we rightly know that organic search results are the best marketing investment for anyone. Especially for small to mid-sized law firms who are looking for the best return on their investment. As such, we can’t be too supportive of Scorpion’s practices, if that is what they are doing.
In the end, of course, everything comes down to you and the choices you want to make.
Scorpion is well-established, yes, but RankToday offers you personalized service for the best prices in the market.
Make your choice today.
