Custom Marine Industry Websites
Marine Industry Websites Built by an Industry Pro
As a 100-ton captain, I know the marine industry like the back of my hand. Before I started offering custom websites and SEO services to boat companies, I spent nearly a decade working professionally as a tour boat captain. Before that, I grew up sailing and competing in regattas. It truly is a lifelong commitment, and I caught the bug at a young age.
There are not many people in this world with my set of skills. I create custom boat company websites that not only have beautiful designs, but are also built by a person with deep boating knowledge. In short, I know how to speak the language of your customers.
Tour Boat Charter Company Websites
Boat charters are a high-competition business, especially in cities with a large tourism market. Having a strong website with a clean, engaging design is essential to set your business apart from the countless other operations on your waterway. There is a lot of money to be made, and if your website is lacking, your charter sales will lag behind the competition.
Boat Charter Company Website Essentials
Tourists are looking for unforgettable experiences. If your website doesn’t capture their attention instantly, they’ll book with your competitor. Let’s make sure you don’t miss another sale.
1. Beautiful Photos of Your Fleet
At the top of your homepage, you should include a full-width photo of your best-selling boat in action. It should be filled with people laughing, hanging out, and enjoying a beautiful day on the water. This lets people see right away how much fun they will have when they book a charter with your company.
You should also include a dedicated page for your fleet, which includes photos of every single boat, with its key features and the types of excursions offered. This helps customers understand exactly what your boats offer, and why they are a step above the competition.
2. Easy Bookings with FareHarbor
A strong, high-converting boat charter website makes it easy to turn visitors into customers. They should never have to go looking for a “Book Now” button, it should always be right there waiting for them when they are ready.
With a WordPress site, you have the opportunity to implement FareHarbor, the number one marine industry solution to handle bookings for your entire fleet. This comes in an easy-to-install plugin that allows you to entire pricing, handle availability, and upsell for increased revenue, right on your website.
3. Clear Pricing and Package Descriptions
When booking a charter, customers appreciate transparency about pricing. Especially because a boat charter is usually a pricy activity relative to the amount of time spent on the water. By including the pricing and exactly what is included with each type of charter, you will build trust, reduce abandoned carts, and get more happy people out on the water all season long.
These pages should explain exactly what is to be included with their booking, and even include optional upgrades to help you maximize your revenue for each individual booking. Since the season only lasts for a limited amount of time, it’s important to make the most of each and every cruise, and this will help you ensure that happens.
4. Strong Local SEO
90% of charter bookings start with a Google search. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that your website is optimized for local SEO, so that your customers find your company first when searching for boat tours in your city.
The low-hanging fruit here is an optimized Google My Business profile, so that your company shows up on the map when customers go looking. But you can take it even further, by creating website copy that targets the specific keywords that those customers are typing into the search bar.
Including customer reviews and testimonials on your website is another great way to optimize for local SEO, and provide social proof that drives even more charter bookings. When potential guests see reviews straight from your past guest, this lets them know they are making the right choice to book with you.
Fishing Charter Company Websites
With a fishing charter company, you get a lot of one-on-one time with your guests, who might vary from families, to bachelor parties, to fishing enthusiasts. They are looking for a knowledgable, friendly guide who can cater the trip to their unique desires, whether that be a more casual day on the water, or truly getting after it and trying to catch the biggest, baddest fish possible.
Therefore, your website allows you to cater to the type of guests you are trying to attract, or take a more general approach and bring in all types. It’s your space to showcase your expertise, personality, and of course, your boat, to give people the full picture and choose you for a day on the water.
Fishing Charter Website Essentials
There are a lot of options in big fishing towns, and having a strong website makes all the difference between your clients choosing you, or choosing one of the ten other guides in your marina.
1. Action Shot at the Top of the Homepage
Putting a big, beautiful action shot of fishing, or of happy guests holding a huge fish on a sunny day, lets people envision themselves on a charter with your company, and immediately showcases that you know what you’re doing. Whether this is a photo or a video, it is an inviting way to start your fishing website, and all the best companies are doing it.
2. Easy Fareharbor Booking
All boat charter companies know about FareHarbor, the comprehensive booking solution for the marine industry. FareHarbor integrates cleanly with a WordPress website (which is what you should be using) so that your customers can seamlessly book charters without ever leaving the page.
It is crucial that you set this plugin up and place booking boxes everywhere that makes sense. Create individual pages for each of your charter offerings, or each boat or guide in your fleet, and embed the FareHarbor booking box directly into the page. This allows you to turn visitors into customers all in one place, getting more people out on the water all season long.
3. Introduce Your Guides & Vessels
Since a fishing charter involves a long amount of time on the water, it becomes a personal experience, and people often want to know the person who will be taking them fishing before booking the charter. Create a section that introduces all your guides, with bios about their backgrounds, personalities, and interests, so that customers can see who they’ll be hanging out with before spending money on a charter.
Additionally, include a photo gallery section that showcases more media like the one at the top of your homepage, with photos of your past guests and guides enjoying their time, catching lots of fish, to present your company as a friendly and approachable option. You know your charters are the best, your website should show your guests exactly why that’s true.
4. Tailored Local SEO
Being a fishing guide, you are expected to know the waterways and the local ecosystem. Your website should do the same, immersing itself in the region and packed with rich keywords related to your city, the bodies of water that you fish on, and the wildlife that might be seen along the way. And of course, the types of fish you catch.
This is not as simple as setting up your Google My Business profile, but that’s also importing. I’m talking about including informative descriptions, and copy that weaves in lots of locally-focuses phrases that people search for when looking for a fishing charter in your city.
Ready to supercharge your fishing charter company website? Let’s get to work.
Boat Repair Shop Websites
In the boat repair business, your website is your digital front door that lets customers take a look around before deciding to trust you with their vessel. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure your website offers the best possible representation of your expertise and the services you provide, so they know they are making the right choice.
Boat Repair Company Website Essentials
When a customer’s boat breaks down, they usually don’t know how to fix it themselves. Right away they start looking for a reputable boat repair shop near them, so they can get back on the water as soon as possible. This is where having a strong website for your boat repair shop comes into play.
1. Service Pages for Every Offering
A common mistake for boat repair shops is to simply list all their offerings on the homepage, and call it a day. While this is a good practice, the top boat repair company websites take this a step further, and implement individual service pages for everything the shop has to offer.
Not only does this allow you to showcase your expertise, it also helps you attract leads from customers who are looking for your specific service. A simple listing does not include enough context for search engines to know that your shop offers a particular service.
This is your time to shine, with descriptions that highlight your competency, experience, and process for making these repairs, alongside photos of past work and even specific examples of how you helped customers with a similar problem in the past.
2. Clear Contact Methods & Easy Appointments
The most important thing you can do to drive repair bookings for your shop is to make it extremely easy for potential customers to get ahold of you. This means putting your phone number at the top of the page, including several contact forms with clear buttons for reaching out, and even easy access to social media links.
If a customer is looking for boat repair, but they can’t easily see a way to reach your shop, they will just leave your website and go call the next repair shop. As a service pro, you know how much people love their boats, and they often feel a sense of urgency to get them back on the water, especially when something breaks in the middle of the season (like it always does).
Make it dead simple to reach you, and the bookings will come to you.
3. Testimonials & Case Studies
When you do a stellar job on somebody’s boat, they are naturally going to write a great review, or even send you a gratuitous thank-you email explaining how much they appreciate your service. If you’ve been in business for a while, you probably have plenty of these already. Or, you might have solved a complex or unique problem with expertise, allowing you to create a case study that outlines your process and approach.
Both of these are golden assets for your boat repair business, and should be proudly showcased on your website, so that potential customers can see that you are the real-deal, with trusted and proven success that others rave about. This can be an extremely powerful motivator for people who need work done on their beloved boat.
4. Local SEO Optimization
This is similar to having service pages for every offering, but local SEO optimization allows you to strategically target your geographic area, placing your website at the top of Google’s search results when people go looking for boat repair shops.
Including Google My Business Optimization, which allows you to show up on the map, display photos, services, and even allows customers to make reviews, you can level up your local SEO presence by packing your website full of the exact keywords that people type into Google when they need boat repairs in your city.
To do this, you need to make sure that your geographic service area is made very clear to both Google and your potential customers, allowing you to attract people who need your services exactly when and where they need them.
Boat & Yacht Dealership Websites
As a boat or yacht dealership, you are selling high ticket items that people are hoping to buy once and enjoy for many years to come. For this reason, the most important thing that your website needs to do is establish trust, and communicate why they should buy a boat from you instead of your competitor.
Boat & Yacht Dealership Website Essentials
Everything about your dealership website should showcase your class and trustworthiness as a reputable seller with a pristine inventory of boats and yachts. There’s no fluff here––it’s purpose-built and laser-focused on converting visitors into boat owners.
1. Showcase Your Inventory
Right at the top of the site, include a large, full-width photo of your nicest, or best-selling boat or yacht, preferably underway on a glorious day. This both shows visitors what you specialize in, and gets their mouth watering, picturing themselves on the water in a vessel sold by you.
Additionally, you should keep an inventory page up-to-date with high-quality photos of your offerings. Whether you sell new or used boats, this page should always be current, place the nicest boats near the top by default, and allow sorting based on preferences like brand, price range, and size. This makes it easy for visitors to see that you are the dealership they need to be working with.
2. Introduce Your Team
The best boat dealership websites always showcase their team of trustworthy and reliable sales reps, mechanics, and even their office staff. This paints a picture for visitors of exactly who they will be dealing with when they visit your store.
Each team member should be given their own bio page that highlights their background and achievements, and any special skills they bring to the table. Again, this help you to establish trust, and breaks barrier that naturally exists when shopping online. It makes them feel like they’re on the digital showroom floor.
3. Easy Way to Contact & Request Quotes
There should be no question about how to get in touch with your team, so that visitors can easily transition into buyer with minimal effort. List your phone number, include contact forms, place buttons for requesting quotes about specific vessels, all so that potential customers who are ready to purchase can pull the trigger with ease. All they have to do is follow your call-to-action right into the physical location to sign the paperwork.
If you have financing options available, you should also make these abundantly clear on the website. Sticker shock is one of the biggest things that holds people back from making a purchase like this, and you know they are all going to shop around for the best deal. If they see attractive financing packages clearly on display, this shows them that doing business with you can be easy and painless, and get them on the water faster than your competitors.
4. Top-Tier Local SEO
When people are looking to buy a boat, they often search for dealerships and brokers nearby the area where they plan to use their vessel. This is why it’s crucial to ensure that your website is optimized for searches within your local area.
In addition to optimizing your Google My Business profile for map searches, this also includes using lots of highly-relevant keywords in your descriptions that are tailored to your geographic region.
Your sales copy should drip with local knowledge in expertise, helping you to establish trust with the customer that you know exactly what boat is right for them, but also for search engines to rank your website at the top of the page, for high converting natural leads that come ready to make a purchase.
Marine Supply Store Websites
For a marine supply store, you have some unique challenges. Not only do you have to compete with corporate retailers like West Marine and Amazon, you also have to cater to both hobbyist boaters and professional captains and service shops. They have varying levels of knowledge and expertise, and your site needs to appeal to all of them at once.
Essential Marine Supply Store Website Features
Your customers need boat parts, and you already know that your shop is the best place to purchase them. Your website’s job is to communicate this effectively, and close the deal.
1. Easy Navigation and Search Features
When a potential customer visits your website, it should be very easy for them to see what you carry, what’s in stock, and find what they’re looking for. You should include information about the brands you work with, allow users to search for individual products, and find the parts they need without hassle. If you nail this, everything else falls into place, and you will sell parts like hot cakes.
2. E-Commerce Integration & Online Ordering
It’s no secret that people prefer to shop online now more than ever. Integrating an online checkout system so that people can buy boat parts from you directly on your website is a huge advantage that will help you drive massive revenue and turn over lots of product.
You should integrate ways to track your inventory, and streamline it with the in-store point-of-sale system, so that people can decide whether they want to come in, or simply make an online order to get the parts they need.
3. Detailed Product Pages with Customer Reviews
Your product pages are the secret sauce to your success, and where you get to showcase your unique knowledge and appeal to both casual visitors who don’t know what they need, and experts who know exactly what they’re looking for.
These pages should include several images of each product, preferably unique photos that you snapped in-store, along with detailed descriptions and bulleted lists of unique features and use-cases for each product. This is a time-consuming endeavor, but it will pay for itself because you get to show people what they need and why, without having to explain it to them 16 different ways over the phone.
Plus, customer reviews offer social proof, so past purchasers can share their experience and help do the heavy lifting for you, and provide valuable internal data about which parts you should keep in stock, and which ones should be swapped for a different brand.
4. Local SEO Optimization
A major advantage for a local marine supply shop comes from the nature of boat people. They generally prefer to support local businesses over big box retail stores, because they know better than anybody the importance of the local ecosystem.
You can use this to your advantage, not only by optimizing your Google My Business profile, but also by weaving in lots of location-specific keywords when writing the copy on your landing pages. Locals will naturally be your best customers, and if it’s easy for them to find you online, they will always choose you over your large corporate competitors, especially if you make them feel right at home.
Marina Websites
A marina website is your digital home that allows potential visitors to see exactly what they are getting themselves into when they come to tie up there. You know better than anybody how particular boat owners can be, especially when they are looking for a long-term place to keep their boat, or when they are traveling a great distance.
That’s why it’s critical to have a powerful, yet simple website that makes boaters feel right at home, so they know they will be in good hands at your marina.
Essentials for Marina Websites
The secret to a good marina website is powerful simplicity. It’s well known that boaters are not the most tech-savvy people, so you don’t want to overload them with too much information in their face. You need a few key essentials, and they need to work seamlessly.
1. Large Overhead Photo or Video at the Top
The best marina websites always include an overhead view of the marina, in either photo or video format, right at the top of the homepage. This lets potential visitors see the whole marina, its layout, and the types of boats that generally dock there, without having to dig around for it.
This imagery should be captured on a beautiful day, when the marina is full of nice-looking boats. This not only gives social proof––your marina is active and people with expensive boats use it––but it also creates an inviting atmosphere, so that the boat owner is comforted right away with a place that feels warm and familiar, and they can picture themselves in your marina.
2. Rates, Amenities, and Photo Gallery Pages
Each of these pages serves a unique purpose, and let people get the full scope of what’s included when they book a slip at your marina.
The rates page shows exactly how much it costs to book a slip, the core offerings included, and allows boat owners or captains to book a slip right away without distraction. Whether this is through an online booking form, or a phone number, make it clear what is expected of them, and confirmation process. This page should also note whether there are different rates for transients and long-term slips.
The amenities page allows you to showcase everything that your marina has to offer, from special events calendars, to your marina bar, the pool, restroom facilities, and fuel dock, and link to a unique page for each of those offerings.
Then, the photo gallery page allows you to showcase the big picture outside of the main overhead view on the homepage. This lets people envision themselves with a slip at your marina, getting involved in the activities, and see the natural surroundings that make your marina so special.
3. Boater Resources & Local Area Guide
A great marina website provides added value to visitors by providing local resources and guides to the surrounding area. From locally-recommended restaurants to information about the wildlife native to the harbor, this helps position your marina as the go-to place to keep their boat and immerse themselves in the natural environment that makes your marina special.
This section can also include tips on approaching the marina, and nuances about docking there, information about tides and unique challenges, and other information valuable to boaters. This establishes trust and makes your marina stand out among the competition as a place that is deeply aligned with the local culture and ecosystem, to help boaters make the most out of their stay.
4. Strong Local SEO
During peak season, there are boaters looking for a place to tie up on a daily basis. That’s why its so important to make sure that your marina’s website is optimized for local SEO, including your Google My Business Page and all other pages on the site.
The best way to do this is to naturally weave in keywords related to your geographic area and marinas throughout your website, both on the homepage and all additional website pages. Doing this will make your site clearly stand out as a marina in your city, and move it right to the top of the page when boat owners are looking for the best marina for their vessel.
Ready to build the ultimate website for your marina? Let’s get started.