The Owner Choosing Your Yard Is 400 km Away and Needs Six Numbers You Have Not Published

This is written for the boatyards, refit and repair shops, riggers, canvas lofts, brokers and marinas working Nanaimo harbour and the central Island coast.

**The person choosing your yard is not standing on your dock**

A boat owner deciding where to haul out for a bottom job, a repower or a winter of work is frequently making that decision from Seattle, Calgary, Vancouver or somewhere further. They have never walked your yard. They may never have been to Nanaimo. They are choosing between you and three other yards on a screen, in February, for work in April.

And they are not browsing. They are checking whether their specific boat physically fits, whether you are allowed to do the work they need, and whether the yard will let them do any of it themselves. Those are yes-or-no questions, and a site that cannot answer them loses the enquiry to one that can — usually without ever knowing the enquiry existed.

**The six numbers, and why their absence costs you work**

Almost every boatyard website in this region describes its services and omits its constraints. The constraints are what the buyer is actually filtering on.

1. **Lift capacity, in tons.** The first filter. An owner with a 40-tonne trawler stops reading the moment they cannot confirm you can pick it up. 2. **Maximum length overall.** Stated for the lift and for the hardstand, because they are not always the same number. 3. **Maximum beam.** The constraint that most often disqualifies a yard for wider multihulls and motor yachts, and the one least often published. 4. **Maximum draft**, together with any tidal window on approach. An owner with a deep-keeled sailboat needs to know whether they can get to you at all, and when. 5. **Air draft or mast height limits**, if anything on the approach or in the yard constrains it, and whether you can unstep a mast on site. 6. **Hardstand capacity and storage rates**, including lay-day charges and what happens if a parts delay pushes a two-week job to five.

Publishing those six in plain text on a page does more for enquiry quality than any amount of photography. It also filters out the boats you cannot serve, which saves everyone a phone call.

**The three policy questions owners ask before they commit**

Beyond the dimensions, there is a set of questions that determine whether an owner will use you at all, and they vary genuinely from yard to yard:

- **Can the owner work on their own boat?** Some yards allow it freely, some restrict it to certain tasks, some prohibit it entirely. This single policy decides where a large segment of owners goes, and it is almost never stated on a website. - **Can they bring in outside contractors?** If so, under what insurance and approval requirements. Owners with a rigger or a mechanic they trust will not move to a yard that will not admit them. - **What are the environmental rules in practice?** Bottom washing and antifouling removal require containment and wastewater capture, and the details of how a yard handles that affect what work can be done, when, and at what cost. Owners have usually been caught out by this somewhere before and appreciate a straight answer.

Add liability and insurance requirements for owner work, and you have answered nearly everything that comes up on a first phone call — which means the calls you do get start further along.

**The calendar is not a marketing calendar**

Marine demand here runs on a rhythm that has nothing to do with quarters.

Autumn brings the haul-out and winter-storage decision. Winter is when refit work gets planned, quoted and booked — which means winter is when the searching happens, even though the work is months out. Spring is the launch and commissioning rush, plus the scramble of owners who left it late. Summer is the cruising season, when the work shifts to breakdowns, urgent repairs and provisioning, and the search intent becomes immediate rather than considered.

There is a second layer on top of that: boats transiting. Vessels heading north toward the Broughtons, Desolation Sound or the Inside Passage pass through, and boats coming up from Puget Sound cross a border on the way. Both groups plan their stops in advance and both search for services along a route rather than in a town.

The practical consequence is that content has to be published against the decision, not the work. A refit page that goes live in April has missed the winter booking season entirely. The yards that fill their spring built that demand in December.

**Capability pages beat a services list**

The common structure is one page headed Services with a list underneath: haul-out, bottom paint, fibreglass, mechanical, rigging, canvas, brokerage. That page ranks for very little, because nobody searches for a list.

What owners search for is a specific problem attached to a specific boat: blister repair, cutlass bearing replacement, repower, shaft alignment, osmosis treatment, teak deck replacement, standing rigging replacement on a particular size of boat. Each of those deserves its own page, explaining what the job involves, what typically drives the price up or down, how long a boat is usually out of the water for it, and what you need from the owner.

That is unglamorous writing, there is very little competition for it, and it is exactly what an owner reads at eleven at night in another province while deciding who to email in the morning.

**What we would look at first**

1. Whether lift capacity, LOA, beam, draft and hardstand limits appear anywhere in text on your site. 2. Whether your owner-work and outside-contractor policies are stated. 3. Whether you have one page per service or one page per job type. 4. Whether anything you have published is aimed at a boat that is not here yet. 5. What your Google Business Profile says about hours during haul-out season, and whether the photos show the yard and the lift rather than a sunset.

**Getting help**

We will read your site the way an owner four hundred kilometres away would, with a specific boat and a specific job in mind, and show you where they would give up and email a different yard.

SEO for Marine Businesses in Nanaimo & the Central Island Harbour

Boatyards, refit and repair, brokers, charters, moorage and marine supply — demand that arrives from off the Island