Case Study · Manufacturing, marine and waterfront equipment
ShoreMaster: Seven Years of SEO Across a Marine Manufacturing Brand Family
7-year engagement across a 3-site brand family
ShoreMaster, one of the best known manufacturers of boat lifts and dock systems in North America, relaunched its corporate site in 2018 and watched a page-one head term slide to page two. Over a seven-year engagement spanning the corporate Umbraco site and two BigCommerce stores, the SEO program ran migration forensics on roughly 5,000 legacy backlinks, restructured both stores, scored 6,200 keywords against more than 20 competitors, and installed a monthly technical audit cadence. The rebuilt pontoon lifts section came through the relaunch stronger: within the first three months post-launch, its primary category query grew average monthly clicks 19% over the pre-launch year while the page held a position near 1.3.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
ShoreMaster manufactures boat lifts, docks, and waterfront equipment, selling through a corporate site plus two ecommerce stores, The Shore Shack and BoatLiftAndCanopy.com, with sister brands PolyDock and RhinoDock in scope. In 2018 the company relaunched shoremaster.com on Umbraco, and the new site gave back ground it had held for years. The site's most important head term slid from roughly position 5.5 on page one to position 12 on page two, and average monthly clicks for that term fell by roughly two thirds. A keyword-by-keyword comparison across 1,770 queries confirmed the pattern was not isolated.
Migration forensics explained why. Of roughly 5,000 legacy backlinks tested, more than 300 pointed at pages returning 404 errors, and 850 internal URLs still ran through permanent redirects. The homepage canonical tag dynamically appended tracking parameters, the XML sitemap carried bad URLs, and the 404 page returned a 200 status, creating soft 404s across the site.
The ecommerce side had its own ceiling. BoatLiftAndCanopy.com could only be browsed by brand, product pages were near duplicates of one another, and category pages carried minimal optimization, structural barriers that capped what the store could earn from search.
The Work
What Was Done
Migration recovery with an audit trail
Every legacy URL went into a redirect QA sheet tracking planned versus actual destination, final status, and redirect loops, backed by two written SEO audits of the relaunched site and months of post-launch crawl error monitoring. Follow-up dev direction fixed the canonical parameter problem, the soft 404s, robots.txt, and successive rounds of 404 remediation, including 95 broken URLs mapped in early 2021 and another 25 in 2022.
Architecture designed ahead of the products
The engagement opened with siloed architecture recommendations for the corporate site: mega menu navigation, breadcrumb taxonomy, HTML and nested sitemaps, and related-page crosslinking. A 2020 architecture map charted the site as it stood against proposed sections for new product lines, so navigation and internal linking were planned before pages were built.
Store structure that could rank
For BoatLiftAndCanopy, brand-only navigation gave way to a category taxonomy with indexable filtered pages built to capture long-tail accessory queries. A 1,000-row title and H1 inventory drove batched on-page updates, and FAQ structured data was added to key accessory pages.
Competitive gap analysis at scale
A March 2021 analysis scored 6,200 keywords against more than 20 competitors, assigning every keyword to one of two playbooks, optimize an existing page or create a new one, with the exact competitor URL to beat in each row. The analysis was distilled into 130 new-page topics, 76 localized article topics for the lake regions where ShoreMaster customers live, and a reorganization of 270 existing blog posts into topic clusters.
A monthly audit cadence across both stores
Through 2023, The Shore Shack and BoatLiftAndCanopy ran on recurring technical audit workbooks tracking 93 issue types, each assigned a priority and an owner across development, SEO, and content. On The Shore Shack, 56 product pages received new titles in two batches, 54 new categories were proposed, 15 FAQs were added, and GA4 was configured through BigCommerce Script Manager.
Diagnostics that told the truth
When clicks declined in 2023, a year-over-year analysis traced exactly which queries and pages were slipping. In late 2024, a follow-up analysis isolated 28 non-branded keywords where positions and impressions were improving but clicks were falling, evidence of a click-through problem in the search results rather than a rankings problem, which redirected the next round of work toward titles and SERP presentation instead of chasing rankings the site already had.
The Payoff
Results
All figures are from Google Search Console for shoremaster.com and compare the year before the 2018 relaunch with the first three months after it. Exact traffic figures and client keywords are confidential; verified data available on request. The relaunch initially cost the site visibility on its most important head term, but the pontoon lifts section, rebuilt on the new architecture with its redirects mapped, came through the migration stronger.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Rebuilt category's primary query, avg monthly clicks | Baseline | +19% |
| Primary query position on the rebuilt category page | 1.59 | 1.26 |
| Plural variant of the same query, avg monthly clicks | Baseline | +32% |
| A branded product term, avg monthly clicks | Baseline | +35% |
The engagement continued through late 2024 across all three sites. Additional performance data available on request.
Tools used: Google Search Console, Google Analytics (Universal Analytics and GA4), Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Majestic, Google Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights, Answer the Public, Trello, Asana
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