Today I look at the websites and rankings of Scorpion Design. After FindLaw, Scorpion is the most successful SEO company in the Legal Space in terms of number of clients. In my database, I counted 141 new personal injury web designs in 2018 from Scorpion. You can see the list here. Scorpion builds really beautiful semi-custom web designs for some of the best law firms in the Country. A full service marketing agency, Scorpion handles SEO, PPC and Social media for thousands of law firms throughout the United States.
Between 2008-2012 large SEO firms like Scorpion and FindLaw had a big advantage when it came to SEO. Back then these companies could leverage their own network of powerful legal websites to power up their client websites. This is no longer the case. Today quality search engine optimization requires a concerted effort for each and every client. This includes building trust by creating link worthy content that authoritative websites actually want to link too. As is the case with Scorpion, this becomes very hard to do when you have thousands of clients to optimize. This inability to scale SEO has translated to poor ranking numbers for most Scorpion clients in competitive markets.
To prove this point I have done an Average Rank Consistency (ARC) analysis on all of the Scorpion personal injury websites in 16 of the most competitive Tier 1 markets in the United States. An ARC score is basically a weighted average of 8 competitive keywords for a given market at a particular time. In the charts below the numbers going from left to right correlate to the page of Google results we found the site on for the following keywords: (geo + Personal Injury Lawyer, Geo+ Car Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Injury Attorney, Geo+ Motorcycle Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Truck Accident Lawyer, Geo+ Wrongful Death Lawyer, Accident Attorney Geo+ and Geo+ Brain Injury Lawyer) .
The best score possible for any given search is 0.5 which reflects the fact that the firm was one of the top 5 results on the first page. A score of 1 means you are on the bottom 5 of the first page, a “2” means the site was on the 2nd page, a “3” third page and so on….. An 11 means that the website did not appear in the first 10 pages of search results. The bolded number to the very right is the actual ARC score, which is a weighted average of the 8 keywords. To simplify, an ARC of 6.00 would mean the average ranking for 8 keywords is basically the 6th page.
For most websites in my database, I have multiple ARC data points, having taken them in late 2016 and again in the last month. For some select markets like Dallas, New York and Miami, I have additional data points. These “ranking snapshots” are helpful in seeing SEO progress over time and are useful in comparing SEO company performance.
Atlanta
Atlanta is one of the most competitive markets in the Country when it comes to SEO. Scorpion’s only client that ranks, Kalka Baer, continues to rank in the top 5 for Injury and personal injury searches, but not much else. In total I count 16 Scorpion sites that target personal injury cases, which is in addition to 4 major clients that have left in the past 2 years. (I have highlighted ex clients in Orange at the bottom of each list)
Austin
Two of the top performing Scorpion sites in Austin do not mark their site with the Scorpion logo, but since they are using the Scorpion CMS we can assume they are still active clients of Scorpion. Scorpion got a huge win in 2018, adding the great trial firm Howry Breen & Herman.
Boston
By far the market with the least amount of market penetration by Scorpion with just two active sites that target Boston. Scorpion also does the site for Percy law Group, a Massachusetts PI firm with offices in Boston, but the main thrust of their SEO is Statewide searches (ARC of 9.58) so I did not include here.
Chicago
There are 13 active Scorpion sites competing for PI cases in The Windy City. In 2018 they added 2 new clients; adding Woodruff Johnson & Evans and the Panio Law Offices who came over from LawLytics. They also redesigned the site for two of their long time clients: Leonard Law Group and the Duncan Law Group. As with most major markets Scorpion struggles in terms of organic SEO, with not a single client with an ARC of under 3.00.
Dallas
12 firms are currently using Scorpion Design to market personal injury in Dallas. Despite a number of top flight law firms, none have an ARC of less than 3.00.
Houston
Scorpion’s top client in Texas, Arnold Itkin, has been with Scorpion since 2012 and is definitely a showcase client.
Las Vegas
One of the most competitve PI markets in the Country has not been good for Scorpion. They have just 4 clients marketing PI in Vegas, having lost 5 clients since 12/22/2016.
Los Angeles
By almost any metric LA is the most competitive online market for personal injury lawyers in the United States. Since Scorpion’s headquarters is in nearby Valencia, its not a surprise they have quite a few sites in the LA area. For the purposes of this analysis I did not include Scorpion sites that targeted LA neighborhoods like Santa Monica, Beverly Hills or Encino. I limited this analysis for sites that targeted Los Angeles as the primary keyword. Once exception is Effres Law who used to target LA but now targets Agoura Hills.
Miami
In early 2019 Scorpion launched the impressive redesign for Inner Circle firm, Stewart Tilghman. In total Scorpion has 9 sites in the marketing targeting personal injury cases. Despite a lower population than other tier one markets, Miami has over 220 focused PI sites competing for PI business.
New York City
New York City is the home to one of Scorpion’s showcase client’s, Perecman Law. The site ranks in the top of the first page for both NYC injury and personal injury searches. The site also ranks for highly competitive construction accident keywords as well. But when you compare to the rest of their clients in the City, you can see that Perecman is an extreme outlier in terms of ARC.
Orange County
Below are the Scorpion PI sites that primarily target “Orange County” this does not include the many sites that target Orange County cities like Irvine or Santa Ana.
Philadelphia
Scorpion has launched several noteworthy sites in Philadelphia over the past few years, but only the Beasley Firm has had any measure of organic ranking success.
Phoenix
The Rafi Law Group sports the best ARC improvement for any Scorpion site in a Tier 1 metro over the past 2 years, going from 8.33 to 1.75 over that time.
San Antonio
In late 2018, Scorpion launched a beautiful new site for Tyler Peery, who was formerly with FindLaw for many year.
San Diego
Scorpion’s long time client in San Diego, the McClellan Firm, recently redesigned their website.
San Francisco
With ten active personal injury sites targeting San Fran, this is a very strong market for Scorpion when it comes to injury sites. *Vanderwalde’s primary focus is San Jose, but two years ago was attempting to target SF with many of their pages.
Summary
Putting too much stock in a single ARC score is problematic. Rankings change all the time and they are often personalized. The other issue is a site may have just launched or is a design only client (no SEO), which may contribute to a very high (bad) ARC score. Conversely a very good ARC score may be an outlier, where the great rankings are the result of someone else. But ARC does start to become meaningful when you have as many data points as I do. Above I have shared close to 400 ARC scores taken over the past two years on Scorpion personal injury websites in Tier 1 markets. While Scorpion has launched many impressive content rich websites over that time, their inability to get consistent rankings for those clients is quite clear based on the data.
Scorpion vs iLawyermarketing
*Full Disclosure* I am the national Sales Director for iLawyermarketing, so I obviously have a preference here. That said, the ARC numbers dont lie. Take our two clients in Philly. Our long term client, Rosenbaum Injury Firm has the best ARC score in the market, while our newer client, Anapol Weiss has shown dramatic ranking improvement since starting with us in 2017.
During the most recent ARC analysis Scorpion only had 4 sites with an ARC less than 2.00 in Tier 1 markets. iLawyermarketing on the other hand, had 14 clients with an ARC of less than 2.00 and several with ARC less than 1.00 in Tier 1 markets. In fact in 8 of the 16 markets listed above, we have the top ARC score in 8 of them!
The point of this post is not to pick on Scorpion. I have this data for hundreds of legal SEO companies and Scorpion is far better than most. While they have trouble ranking in Tier 1 markets, they do very well in Tier 3, 4 and 5 markets. They also offer smaller firms a very affordable and balanced web marketing program – one that includes both SEO, Social Media and PPC to go along with their beautiful websites.