Hartzel Marine

Summary

Hartzel Marine has repaired, winterized, and stored boats since 2001, and relocated to Dunnville on the Grand River in 2026. The old site was thin: a few pages, not enough information to answer what an owner actually wanted to know, no page for any individual service, and nothing for the towns customers trailer in from. Every search that mattered, whether boat winterization or boat repair in Welland, had no page to land on. The rebuild gave each service and each service area its own page, written with real local detail rather than swapped town names.

The business problem

The previous website was too thin to compete or to convert. It did not explain the work in enough depth for an owner deciding who to trust with a repair, and it had no page for any single service or any single town. A boater searching for boat winterization, or for boat repair in Welland, found nothing to land on, so a shop with 24 years of reputation was invisible on the searches its own customers were running.

Strategy

Give every service and every service area a real page, then make each one worth ranking. Depth is the strategy: written estimates, turnaround targets, what a job actually includes, and the local specifics of each town, so the pages earn the position instead of padding a sitemap.

Design direction

Industrial and confident, built for a working shop rather than a brochure. High-contrast type, wide uppercase headings, numbered service and trust blocks, and real photography from the shop floor and the yard. The phone number stays the loudest element on every screen, because in marine service the call is the conversion.

Development approach

Astro on Vercel, statically generated so all 70+ pages ship as prerendered HTML with almost no client JavaScript, which is what keeps a site this size fast. Services, service areas, and the service-by-city pages are generated from structured content, so a new town or a new service is a data entry rather than a hand-built page. Semantic, accessible markup and optimized imagery throughout.

SEO approach

The architecture is the SEO. 18 service pages, 17 service-area pages, and 24 service-by-city pages that pair a specific job with a specific town, each with its own local angle, drive times, FAQs, and internal links to neighbouring towns and related services. Store, Service, FAQPage, and BreadcrumbList structured data with City areaServed, aligned with the Google Business Profile and with the visible content.

Conversion approach

Tap-to-call is pinned and repeated: in the header, after the local angle, after the service detail, and in the closing block of every page. The pages answer the questions that decide the call before it happens, including written estimates before any work, 48-hour in-season diagnostic targets, and what each job includes, so an owner picks up the phone already knowing how the shop operates.

Key features

• Dedicated page per service, 18 in total
• Service-area page per town, 17 in total
• 24 service-by-city pages with genuine local detail
• Used boat and outboard listings with per-boat pages
• Store + Service + FAQPage structured data with City areaServed
• Tap-to-call conversion path on every page

Results

Google Search Console showed significant growth in both impressions and clicks within the first 45 days of the rebuild. That is the expected shape when a site goes from having no page for a given search to having a specific, genuinely local one: the pages become eligible for queries the old site could never appear for, and impressions move first, with clicks following as positions settle.

• Significant growth in impressions and clicks within 45 days of launch, measured in Google Search Console
• Grew from a handful of pages to 70+ indexable pages, each targeting a search the old site could not appear for
• 18 service pages where previously there were none, one per job the shop actually does
• 17 service-area pages plus 24 service-by-city combinations, so 'boat repair in Welland' has a real page instead of a generic homepage
• City pages carry genuine local detail (drive times, which lake or canal the boats run, the jobs common to that town), not one template with the town name swapped
• Store + Service + FAQPage structured data with City areaServed, aligned with the Google Business Profile
• Statically generated Astro build: 70+ pages as prerendered HTML with minimal client JavaScript

Every claim above is verifiable against the live site or the work delivered. Where third-party metrics exist, they are sourced from Google Search results or Google Business Profile.