Man, I really hate talking smack on other web designers, but there are some pretty huge, fundamental flaws in design here. I spent a couple of minutes trying out the quick search, and it looks like there are required fields in order to search, but you just get a dead search button, rather than a prompt telling you what you did wrong.

How can a designer not include at least that basic level of SEO? I can (almost) forgive whoever the project manager of some real estate brokerage was for being clueless about the basics but not a web designer. Come on… titles are 5 seconds a page and a weak guess would be better than that. Maybe they just tossed the site up and are planning to do the SEO as a separate contract or something?

So many things wrong in there. Whoever did this truly had no idea what they were doing, or buying for that matter. 

There’s a potentially confounding factor here: What do you do when your firm’s namesake (Alain Pinel) works for a competing brokerage? http://interoreblog.com/2012/01/03/alain-pinel-is-back-in-town%E2%80%A6/ 

Ouch!  That’s kinda funny, Drew.  Job security, my friend.

Hi Drew,

Thank you for your feedback about our new website. As it had
been many years since our last major redesign of apr.com, we were anxious to
go live with a beta version. We are in the process of adding more content,
fixing some minor bugs and completing a more comprehensive SEO review as we
continually work to enhance and improve our website. Check back soon to see
some of these improvements. If you have additional comments, we would be happy
to hear from you – [email protected].

Andrew V.

Social Media Marketing Coordinator

Alain Pinel Realtors 

Wow, that is about as basic as it gets. Someone wasn’t really paying attention there at all.

“Brokerages wonder why they are getting crushed in the SEO results.”

You might be giving too much credit there.  As much as we talk about it, many still don’t even know what SEO is or understand its value. 

Clearly, whoever let this site go live doesn’t.  I don’t see titles, keywords, description, etc.

Hey Andrew-
Sorry, this comment was stuck in the spam bucket until just now.

Best of luck with your enhancements. The search and calls to action (conversion) on the home page need major work IMO.

I think what happens quite frequently with all new sites (regardless of the industry), is once everyone in the company sees the new site, there’s tremendous pressure to “go live” before it’s actually complete. To those who don’t understand SEO fundamentals, the site may “appear” complete – they don’t realize that launching a site without all the SEO in place can significantly harm their current rankings. (Oh… and let’s not even get into having proper 301’s as part of the conversion.)

I’ve been in this position more than once, and argued the point till I was blue in the face. They launched anyway, and rankings plummeted. I wasn’t around to say “I told you so.”

How about calling APR in private and suggesting corrections instead of publicly embarrassing them? This post seems unnecessarily cruel to me. 

Interesting post and thanks for
sharing.

Drew, I totally agree… I’m not sure if the brokerages still don’t understand why some brokerages are still operating under the assumption that a pretty site is all they need.  I was just looking at a local real estate site that started a blog recently.  The blog looks fantastic – a lot of thought was given to the subject, the use of photos, etc. and then every post I read has a gazillion link HERE for more information – with here being the anchor and meta tag.  Sad…