Blackbeard’s 18th-century treasure is believed to be off the North Carolina coast in 25 feet of water.
It’s still less hidden than a website without proper SEO.
Local Search Engine Optimization
Why Get Local SEO Services From Us?
Your website is a garden of language and links. Consider our team digital gardeners, cultivating layers of nutrition for the centerpiece of your business’s SEO: your site.
We believe in building on the basics. We begin by fixing technical and UX design issues. When your site is calibrated, we dig into the internal architecture that supports your entire web presence: citation building, NAP (Name/Address/Phone number) listing correction, onsite audits for meta and alt image descriptors, and link-building. This is the task of building support structures with the right language for your business. When we’ve strengthened the foundations, we develop custom-tailored creative content approaches that range from niche blog topics to partnerships and outreach with local tourism sites.
The end result? A front-page ranking website that brings you new leads.
Local SEO Case Study
Lake Granbury Marina
Lake Granbury Marina is a VIP Marinas destination marina in Granbury, Texas that presents a thriving waterfront with onsite attractions like Stumpy’s Lakeside Grill, Stumpy’s Closet, Stumpy’s Sweet Shack, and North Texas Kayak, the region’s official Hobie Kayak dealership. The marina offers boat storage, boat and jet ski rentals, and of course, bread for kids to feed the carp from the docks.
The Challenge:
Lake Granbury Marina’s individual brand was tightly intertwined with its iconic onsite restaurant, Stumpy’s, and its digital presence was muddled with restaurant-related SEO. The goal was to power up the marina’s Google rankings and fully establish Lake Granbury Marina as the premier marina destination on Lake Granbury.
The Process:
- We applied our foundational approach by addressing NAP (Name/Address/Phone Number) errors on directory listings, building citations, and strengthening backlinks.
- We built additional SEO-optimized web pages like “Lake Granbury Attractions” and “Lake Granbury Weather” to capitalize on local SEO draws.
- We strove to strengthen the marina’s individual media presence with creative public relations-based avenues like bespoke media placement on Visit Granbury, the region’s major tourism platform.
The Outcomes
- Lake Granbury Marina dominates the major marine-related keyword phrases in Granbury, Texas, including “Granbury boat rentals” and “Granbury boat slips.”
- Between April and October 2024, the site’s average Google ranking across searches for Lake Granbury Marinas and marine-related searches rose 12 positions. The marina’s “Local Finder” average Google ranking for searches like “marinas near me” rose 11 positions from 17th to sixth, and continues to show an upward trend.
Recommended timeline:
SEO is a service that very much aligns with the idea of, “What you give is what you get.” It requires time to build. We offer a “standard” four-month plan that corrects and updates your marine-platform profiles like Marinas.com, Marinalife, and ActiveCaptain, along with all the link-building and onsite audit accouterments.
Our six-month “Enterprise Plan” SEO option takes the basic tenets of SEO-building and applies a more expansive focus on content creation and link-building (Example: Instead of building you three new website pages, you might get ten). The standard option is pouring concrete for the addition to your home, and the second tier is an excavator mounting skyscraper columns on digital bedrock. It depends on how much you want to build.
What does it cost?
$1,200 per month for the standard plan (We also recommend a link-building spend but it isn’t mandatory). $2,500 per month for the Enterprise Plan with a $400 minimum monthly link-building spend.
Note: Link-building budgets may be variable based on the level of link-strengthening your business needs to dominate page authority for your key services in local markets.
What you can expect:
- Builds and updates for major marine-specific platforms with backlinks
- Name/Address/Phone number (NAP) corrections and citation building for high-authority directories
- Web optimizations for load times and design issues
- Page-by-page line edits for headers, titles, meta descriptions, alt image text, page “robustness,” and keyword strength
- Thorough campaigns for link-building research, outreach, and acquisition
- Monthly reports with ranking and page authority metrics and a leads sheet updated weekly (accessible to clients anytime)
- Creative content strategy that involves new website page creation and/or collaboration with major regional publications
What we need from you
- The website we’ll be working on with website and hosting login credentials
- A list of community nonprofits and clubs your business hosts or supports
Blog Writing
What does a healthy blog do for my business?
Your blog is a living representation that this is an active, engaged business. An up-to-date blog is an underrated community-building tool for promoting events, and a powerful form of SEO, as you can design articles that focus on hyper-niche topics that will draw traffic to your services.
Hammer and Nail applies stringent journalistic standards to voice-driven creative copywriting. We use an in-house style guide based on AP Style and build articles that apply a rich, investigative approach. Our blog articles often involve interviews with a marina owner or event representative to focus on the human component. We create narrative-driven, authoritative prose with a mission to represent your brand’s tone with informative content that customers actually want to read to the end.
Blog Writing Case Study
Marina Bay Harbor Marina
Marina Bay Harbor Marina exists in a natural cove on Clear Lake, Texas, a Gulf Coast body of water connected to Galveston Bay. The marina competition on the lake is impressive, with close to a dozen marinas serving 2,000 acres of lake and a strong Gulf Coast sportfishing community.
The Challenge
Marina Bay Harbor Marina is the only marina to offer live shrimp bait on Clear Lake at its ship store and one of just two local marinas (as of October 2024) that offers ethanol-free gasoline.
The challenge was to write two original SEO-optimized blog articles that would dominate the local search volume for “live bait at Clear Lake” and “ethanol-free gasoline at Clear Lake.”
The Process
- We set the article standards at 1,000 words each, with a tone directed to be authoritative yet framed with low to neutral bias to offer a truly informative deep dive.
The Outcomes
- The “live shrimp bait” article rose to fourth on Google’s first page for local search terms related to “live bait on Clear Lake.”
- The “ethanol-free gasoline” article rose to first on Google’s first page for local search variations of “ethanol-free gasoline on Clear Lake.”
Recommended timeline:
We recommend maintaining an active blog with at least four posts per year, but more aggressive businesses that want to continue to strengthen their niche presence may opt for monthly or even bi-weekly posts.
What does it cost?
$600 per feature article.
What you can expect:
- An original 1,000 to 1,200-word blog article based on a local keyword-targeted concept
- An investigative approach that applies journalistic fact-checking and quote attribution standards
- Formatting and posting of blog articles
- A writing team that applies microscopic focus to line edits for grammar, syntax, style, and accuracy
What we need from you
- We can research topics, but we love when clients bring a list of service-related topics where they’d like to increase attention.
- Log-in credentials that allow us to format and post from your website’s blog dashboard
Want a sample without buying the whole package?
Enter your email and we’ll send you a free marina marketing guide to help you with some basic best practices for marine marketing.
Interested in working with us?
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does an SEO project take?
The service works in one-month project deliverables for our internal workflow, but we apply multiple strategies over the course of four or six-month windows. SEO services for marine businesses work great when started a month or two before the spring season kicks in, but will help any time of the year. If you want SEO services for a custom amount of time, we are happy to work with you on a month-to-month basis. However, you should expect to continue the service for at least three months for the best possible results.
How soon should I see results?
That depends on a lot of factors: how competitive your niche is, how strong your domain is relative to competitors, your existing backlink profile and anchor-text diversity, the breadth of your existing content reservoir, and so forth. If you’re in an extremely competitive niche and/or are looking for faster results, we suggest you pair this with other services to increase results. Also, please remember that we do not decide what shows up in search results and no one can guarantee you the number one spot (or any other spot).
Can you guarantee me high-domain-authority links?
No, for outreach we can’t guarantee any links at all – it’s the nature of relationship-based link-building. It’s 100% safe but requires editorial placement of links and that can’t be assured. We do use multiple techniques to acquire links, including outreach to regional and niche-based publications. We start with marine-based backlinks on the major directory platforms and local tourism entities, and grow from there.
How much will my rankings improve?
That depends on a lot of different factors, including how competitive your keywords are and what your domain authority and backlink profile look like. It also depends on how much improvement needs to be made. If you were not initially optimized at all for the right keywords, you could see substantial improvement.
How do I get started?
It’s pretty simple, after you purchase you will receive a brief questionnaire where you’ll provide all the info needed. We require a two-week notice before implementing any new services. Then we’ll get started.
What else do you need?
FROM OUR BLOG
The Sea Tow Foundation awards Hammer and Nail with a 2025 National Boater Safety Award
Sea Tow Foundation honors Hammer and Nail Marketing with the 2025 National Boater Safety Award at IBEX Tampa for the “Boater Safety Is Good Business” campaign.
Granbury’s Stumpy’s Lakeside Grill earns Honorable Mention in Marinalife’s 2024 Reader’s Choice Awards
VIP Marinas Group’s Stumpy’s Lakeside Grill was awarded an “Honorable Mention” in the 2024 Marinalife Reader’s Choice Awards for “Best Dockside Bar” by Marinalife.