Marine website set for smoother sailing

Over the last few weeks, we have been focussing on some major SEO improvements for one of our brands which sells boats…

The Problem

The website was performing moderately for boat manufacturer based searches within Google search results (such as “fairline boats for sale”) but there was still much room for improvement.

Along with manfacturer based searches, we also wanted to improve our ranking for the most generic term of “boats for sale” for which we were appearing around page 10 of results.

So what did we do?

We focussed on three main areas:

Document outline – Over time, as the website grew, the document outline got a little left behind.  We ensured that all pages throughout the website were semantically correct; whether you were looking at the homepage, a list of boats or an actual boat itself.  Obviously the benefit from this being that spiders can crawl our nicely strucutred pages much easier.

Friendly URL’s – All page url’s were made up of the standard symfony stucture based on search criteria.  This would work well for when a user performed a real search on the website, but for popular pages we want to encourage regular crawling of, it didn’t work well at all.  For example, previously the page for displaying all Beneteau boats for sale would have been http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/Boats/preSearch/ locationCountryId/0/manufacturer/Beneteau/clearAll/1 and has now been updated to a concise http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/Search-by-manufacturer/Beneteau

The updates on the URL structures affected:

• Popular Brands
• Country (great for our long tail indexing)
• Boat types

Obviously, we had to put some 301 rules in, so we can catch old pages successfully

Stop the SPAM!

YBW is lucky to have a thriving forum community.  So whilst the discussions grow and grow, so does the amount of instances of links in the YBW portal navigation (shown below).

Whilst these links are valuable for a user; for a spider it could be considered as keyword spamming.  So we simply made these links nofollow if they were found within the Forum.

The Results

As mentioned above, our generic search of “boats for sale” saw us somewhere around 100+ on Google.

We continued to monitor daily to see what affect our changes were having.  Generally, our new URLs were indexed within 2 days.  In terms of the generic search results placement, we saw a steady progress upwards to pages 4-5 of SERPs within the first two weeks.

Today, we are appearing at the top of the second page (14th postition) which is a fantastic climb within only three weeks of putting the changes public.  Obviously, we still have room for improvement by getting to the first page; but we have some further ideas in the pipeline!