Worked example
Worked example: a Hamble yacht brokerage, from portal-dependent to enquiries of its own
This is a worked example, labelled as one because we do not yet have a Southampton marine client to publish. The brokerage is a composite of the broker sites we have audited; the plan is exactly what we would do; the reference figures are from real accounts elsewhere and are marked where they appear.
The starting point is the common one: forty listings syndicated to YachtWorld, Rightboat and Apollo Duck, a six-page website that repeats the listings, and a Search Console that shows the broker\u2019s own name and nothing else.
By Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 6 October 2026
40
listings on four portals and the site
6
pages on the site, five of them copies
72% to 29%
duplication on a real account, reference
1 to 21
reviews in ten weeks on a real account, reference
The audit
Six pages, one of them working
The home page ranks for the broker\u2019s name and for nothing else, which is normal and fine. The listing pages do not rank at all, because the same text sits on four portals with twenty years of history each, and Google shows the biggest copy. The About page has no names on it, the Contact page has a form that goes to an inbox checked weekly, and there is no page for the question every seller asks before ringing: what is the commission, and how long will it take.
The Google Business Profile exists, is categorised as a generic business and has four reviews, two of them from the owner\u2019s family. Searching the broker\u2019s name with the word reviews after it returns a portal page, not the profile.
The plan
Five pages, in the order they earn
We leave the listings to the portals and build what the portals cannot have.
| Order | Page | The search it answers | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Selling your boat | sell my boat Southampton, yacht broker commission | The commission, the valuation process, time-to-sell by boat type, the sold archive |
| 2 | Hamble, Swanwick, Ocean Village | yacht brokers Hamble, boat brokers Swanwick | One page per marina worked from, about that marina: pontoon, office, viewings, parking |
| 3 | The sold archive | [broker] reviews, [broker] sold | Every boat sold, month and marina, the one proof a new broker cannot fake |
| 4 | About, with names | [broker] Hamble | The people, what they sail, the trade body membership linked to the register |
| 5 | Ten listing pages rebuilt | the ten boats that justify an hour each | Walkthrough video, survey summary, the pricing paragraph, the broker\u2019s direct line |
What the reference accounts say about the scale
Duplication fixed and reviews built, on real accounts elsewhere
The duplication is the same problem we measured on a rebuilt trade site in Flintshire, where 24 near-identical pages scored 72% similarity to each other and eleven of them had dropped out of Google\u2019s index; rewritten page by page, the figure fell to 29% and 51 of 52 pages were indexed within five weeks. That account is published, named, on our garage site; it is not a marine account and is quoted here only for the scale of the mechanism.
The reviews routine is the one from a Cheshire garage we run, where the profile went from one review to twenty-one in ten weeks by asking at the handover and nowhere else. A broker has two handovers per sale, the seller\u2019s and the buyer\u2019s, and we would ask at both.
What we would expect, labelled as expectation: brand and marina searches on page one within weeks, because few brokers have written those pages; the selling-page searches over three to six months; enquiries from the site rather than the portals measurable from the first month if the form asks the one question. We would publish the Search Console figures on this site at day 90, whatever they said.
Judge the method, not the story
The free audit runs the same measurements on your site
Every number on this page came from Search Console, the coverage sweep or a page-by-page crawl, and all three are free to repeat. The audit we run before quoting a Southampton business does exactly that, and you get the figures whether or not you hire us.
How to read this page
- The brokerage is a composite; no Hamble or Southampton broker is named, described or implied.
- The plan is the one we would run, in the order we would run it.
- Every reference figure is from a real account elsewhere and is marked on the line where it appears. It is the scale we plan against, not a promise.
See what is stopping your business ranking in Southampton
Send us your website and your trade. You get a plain-English audit of where you stand against the three Southampton businesses above you, and a fixed price. No meeting, no long contract.