About the Watertown Wisconsin Realty Network

The Watertown Realty Network is designed to simplify the process of locating our local real estate listings and real estate professionals as simply and conveniently as possible. Watertown Realty Network was born when we decided to sell our house and I began searching the Internet for our new home. I found it difficult and frustrating to find local Watertown area real estate listings by using the usual everyday search engine techniques. I found that the local Watertown area real estate listings did not come up readily in searches conducted on the major search engines.

Watertown area real estate professionals might be quite interested in the comments we received from a visitor to our sister site: www.watertownweb.net. Bonnie used to live in Watertown and now is considering relocating back to the area. She too, has found that searching the Internet for Watertown area real estate information has proven to be a frustrating experience for her.

I found myself visiting what I call "headquarter sites" for major realty office companies (example: the main Shorewest web site) and then click from page to page to page within the main company site, inputting information on each page in order to narrow down my search to find the real estate listings and local branch office located in the Watertown, WI area. In order to do this, I first had to know the names of the major real estate companies that might have Watertown area offices. This is not to say that Shorewest's way of doing things is bad, certainly not! But it didn't suit my purposes.

Another example of having to take extra steps in my searching is found here: http://www.wisconsinhomes.com/offices/ which again did not suit my own purposes and caused me to spend more time than I wanted to in my search efforts. I didn't want a directory, I wanted real estate offices and I wanted them now! You'll see that I pretty much had to know the actual name of the company I was looking for in order to find it. Not fun when you don't have a clue what the company name is that you want to locate.

I ran into some real estate sites that required me to input information into forms that would be sent to these main offices and provide them the opportunity to contact me. In order to view the information I was looking for, these forms had to be filled out or I could not gain access just to look at what I wanted to see. I was not ready for this. I wanted to contact the office of my choice when I was ready, not have several sales associates contact me because I filled out their form. I wanted to do my own shopping and I wanted to contact the real estate office of my choice in my own time about their services.

Enter the telephone book and the local Watertown Daily Times newspaper and more time researching when what I really wanted to be doing was looking at actual real estate listings, photos of pretty houses with big yards and white picket fences. My dream home in the country had to be out there somewhere!

I was directed to sites like www.realtor.com and www.homes.com which are terrific sites, providing some great information and fantastic features! But I still had to wade through several pages of inputting information to find our local area real estate information. I thought: "This is nuts! I should be able to find local Watertown area real estate and realtor information on a quick search of Google without having to take all these extra steps.

The thought also struck me that I pretty much live on the computer and I also develop web sites, so I know my way around these things better than the casual computer and Internet user. I got to thinking that if someone like myself had trouble finding the information I was looking for, then what must it be like for the casual user?

I also wonder ... are the local real estate professionals who have web sites aware that their sites are not being found in an efficient manner? Wonder what I'm talking about? Try this little test scenerio ...

If you're involved at all in the real estate business, pretend you're not. Instead for the purposes of this test you're just an everyday citizen, Mr. or Mrs. John Q. Public and you decided to search the Internet to find a new house in the Watertown, Wisconsin area. Well, the most popular and most used search engine out there today is Google, so let's first go to Google.

When you get there, try inputting some of the basic phrases that "Mr. or Mrs. Know Nothing About Real Estate But Wants to Find a House" would input into a search engine. Here are the keywords that I myself used because I am a "Mrs. Know Nothing About Real Estate" and I need to find a new house in the Watertown, WI area. Below are some of the keywords I used to do my searches.

realty watertown wi / real estate watertown wisconsin / realty companies watertown wi / homes for sale watertown wisconsin / realtors watertown wi / real estate agents watertown wisconsin / real estate offices watertown wi / real estate companies watertown wisconsin

Now, try switching the words around, put watertown wisconsin first and then some realty phrases after it to allow for differences in the way people search. Is your company's real estate web site coming up on the first page of results? How about the second page of results? Did you know that the majority of Internet users who use search engines won't look past the first or second page of results? If your web site isn't in those first two pages of results, you don't get found. Most of what I got out of my searches were directory listings and referral services that I had to wade through in order to find what I was looking for. It would have been so much simpler and more convenient if I could have found what I was looking for in the first or second page of my search results.

This is how Watertown Realty Network was born. The Watertown Realty Network is designed to simplify the process of locating our local real estate listings and real estate professionals as simply and conveniently as possible.