SEO & Web Design Tips for Fast Growing Companies

Can You Guess Who the Fastest Growing Companies Are in the US?

Each year, CNN Money releases their 100 Fastest Growing Companies listthat highlights the fastest growing companies in the United States. The criteria include:

• Revenue ($)
• Revenue Growth (3 year)
• Profit Growth (3 year)
• Total Return (3 year)
• Net Income ($ millions)

The companies tend to change each and every year, but one thing stays the same:

These Companies Websites' All Could Use a Lot of Work

From the overall website design down to the user experience (UX), many companies on the rise simply don't have time to freshen up their website as they continue to grow. Unfortunately for these companies, a smooth functioning and well-designed website is an essential sales tool for an organization.

Google advocates a proven methodical approach to website design and UX that features four steps, one of which we have highlighted below:

Optimize the site by determining which combinations of site content and design drive the most conversions

With that said, we randomly selected three companies from this years 100 Fastest Growing Companies List and noted:

• One minor change they could make that would greatly improve their website design and UX
• One change they can make to their website's SEO to improve their search ranking.

United Therapeutics

United Therapeutics creates products that address the unmet needs of medical patients.

With 33% revenue growth over the past three years, United Therapeutics is positioning themselves to continue delivering valuable medical technologies to the world for years to come.

So what's wrong with their website?

No Clear Call to Action

As you reach their homepage, what action do you think they want you to take next? Read about the company history? Contact the company directly?

A well designed website will usually highlight specific actions site visitors should take based upon images, buttons, color schemes & other design elements.

On the note of a lacking call to action, a few organic search improvements we noticed were:

1. Create separate product pages for the three products currently in market. Right now, they display all three of their products' information on the same page. If they could create a separate page for each and optimize these by name of product, they would have a better chance at having a higher ranking organic search position.
2. Currently, they have entirely independent domains for each product.  Best case scenario would be to have those rank first or second along with a separate page on the Unither.com domain with additional information. Right now they're being beat out by websites like RXList.com, Mayoclinic.com, and medicinenet.com in organic search rankings

Questcor Pharmaceuticals

Questcor is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the treatment of patients with serious, difficult-to-treat autoimmune and inflammatory disorders.

With a 85% revenue increase over the past three years, Questcor saw their initial growth in the early 2000's from the purchase of an anti-inflammatory drug called Acthar Gel. Made from the pituitary glands of pigs and approved by the FDA in 1952 and bought for the bargain price of $100,000, Questcor improved the product and increased the cost per unit by 16x in a few short years, leading to a massive spike in stock price and enabling R&D into other medical products.

So what's wrong with their website?

Cluttered Pages with High Text Density

As our friend Hong Kiat wrote in 11 Common Mistakes in Web Design, cluttered webpages that have a high text density are tough to consume for the visitor and lead to website bounces.

On the note of a lacking call to action, a few organic search improvements we noticed were:

**Unique Meta Descriptions by Page:**Without a meta description tag, you rely on search engines, like Google and Bing, to predict what the most relevant snippet for your result should be.

By laying in meta description tags, you're able to control what the snippet will display,  allowing you to really hit on any messaging that you feel would sway a user into clicking on your result.

Meta descriptions do not influence ranking, but what they do affect click-through-rate on the search engine result page (SERP).

On a security note, we found a page on their website that displays names and email addresses for those taking charge of specific elements of their website. This page definitely should not be publicly viewable.

Taro Pharmaceutical Industries

Simply put: Taro Pharmaceutical Industries develops, markets and researches prescription medications to many countries across the globe.

So what's wrong with their website?

No Clear Call to Action

Again, Hong Kiat's article points out the dangers of having no real call to action on your website.

On the note of a lacking call to action, a few organic search improvements we noticed were:

Taro also lacks title tags for MANY of their pages.

Having unique, optimized title tags helps improve on-page SEO as well as helping those pages show something that you can control on the search engine result page (a page's title tag is the clickable part of a web page's result).

Contrary to What You Think: We're not trying to be jerks!

We simply noticed that a few of the fastest growing companies have websites that don't accurately reflect the budding brand they are building.

There are many great web design resources out there. If you have a minute, please post some of your favorites in the comments section below!