Search Engine Marketing & Optimization for the Marine Industry

Having worked on several search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns in the marine industry I’ve been faced with a common challenge with many of them. Boat and especially yacht manufacturers have a tendency to design their sites in Flash. Understandably so, Flash provides a wonderfully rich experience for such an emotional purchase.

Unfortunately, Flash is invisible to the search engines, because it’s invisible Flash doesn’t provide relevance or context to the search engine spiders. Recently there is a move away from Flash to HTML5 and jQuery, both of which provide the same visual experience, while providing context to the search engines. With the explosive growth of smartphones and the advent of the iPad marine marketers must quickly address their websites for this growing number of users.

Marine industry website design challenges and SEO

The lack of relevant text related to these design formats requires a fairly substantial  back link development effort for page one organic search engine rankings. Two recent clients, one a sailing catamaran manufacturer and the other a yacht tender manufacturer, whose sites were built heavily in Flash, engaged in a full-fledged backlink building effort. Both companies enjoy top five Google search rankings for at least five, two word keyphrases.

With more than ten years of experience in online marketing coupled with a lifetime of experience in boats and boat yards I am uniquely qualified to provide the marine industry with effective, results driven search engine marketing campaigns.

Please contact me today to discuss your marine industry search engine marketing challenges.