A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Meltemi Blue Charters · Yacht & sailing charter · Athens
+139%
direct charter revenue over a 12-month passage, travel & leisure · Athens, Greece
The challenge
Every yacht shared one generic template with no pricing or availability markup. The marketplaces' indexed listings beat the fleet's own pages for its own boat names.
Meltemi Blue runs 26 sailing yachts and catamarans out of Alimos. Its site was a brochure; the marketplaces it paid commission to were the shop. A family searching “Thalassa 46 charter” found three booking platforms, a price and a calendar before they found the boat’s owner — and every one of those bookings cost the fleet up to 20% of the week.
1. sailhub.example
Thalassa 46 charter Greece — compare prices
From €4,150 / week · 4 cabins
2. boatbookr.example
Rent Thalassa 46 in Athens
3. yachtmarket.example
Thalassa 46 | Bareboat yachts Athens
Pre-departure survey
Templates
All 26 yachts rendered from one template: identical title pattern, the same 340-word description, no specs above the fold.
Schema
No Product, Offer or availability markup. Price shown only after a three-step booking widget that crawlers never ran.
Feeds
Marketplaces received a richer XML feed than the site itself: cabins, berths, week prices and open dates.
Cannibalisation
4 marketplaces held positions 1–5 for 19 of the fleet's 26 boat names; the fleet's own page averaged #14.
International
German, French and Italian pages were machine-copied with no hreflang; Google chose the English URL for 71% of non-English queries.
Destinations
One 'Destinations' page listed 40 islands in a paragraph. No route pages, no distances, no links to the yachts that sail them.
Passage plan
Built on our Commerce SEO plan: product data first, then the pages that put it in front of searchers in five languages.
The booking engine publishes one nightly feed per yacht: berth, cabins, length, skipper option, week price by season and open weeks. The site, Merchant Center and the marketplaces all read the same source, so the fleet's own page is never the poorer listing.
Nine hub pages and 24 island-pair routes, each with sailing distance, legs per day, Meltemi exposure and the yachts that fit the crew size. Every route links to the boats that sail it, and every boat links back to its routes.
Product + Offer + availability on all 26 yacht pages, generated from the feed so sold-out weeks drop out overnight. Validated in Search Console on every deploy.
Five languages (en, el, de, fr, it) with reciprocal hreflang, localised titles and prices in euros. Duplicate machine-translated templates were merged into one canonical per language.
The skipper’s log · 12 months
The passage starts in a November calm and follows the Meltemi as it builds to 27 knots in July. Choose a month, or use the arrow keys, to read the entry.
Month 1 of 12 · Nov
Crawl of 26 yacht pages and the 4 marketplaces outranking them. One template, no price, no calendar.
Keyword moves this watch
Revenue index
100
Routes top 5
4
Rich results
0/26
Lead time
4.0 wk
Landfall · results
Direct charter revenue, indexed to month 0 = 100. Each sail is a month; the last one lands at 239: +139%.
+139%
Direct charter revenue
26 / 26
Yacht pages with rich results
52
Island-route keywords top 5
+3 weeks
Avg. booking lead time
4 wk → 7 wk before departure
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Wind rose
Positions · month 0 → 12
| Query | Type | Before | After | Marketplace now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| thalassa 46 charter | Boat name | #14 | #1 | SailHub (#3 → #4) |
| kymata 52 charter price | Boat name | #9 | #1 | BoatBookr (#1 → #2) |
| anemos catamaran athens | Boat name | #18 | #2 | YachtMarket (#2 → #3) |
| meltemi sailing routes | Destination | #19 | #2 | — |
| athens to paros sailing | Island route | — | #3 | — |
| skippered charter athens | Commercial | #12 | #3 | SailHub (#1 → #2) |
| milos sailing charter | Island route | #33 | #4 | — |
| santorini yacht charter week | Island route | #24 | #4 | BoatBookr (#3 → #5) |
| yachtcharter athen | Hreflang · de | #31 | #5 | — |
| cyclades catamaran charter | Island route | #27 | #5 | YachtMarket (#4 → #6) |
1. meltemiblue.gr
Thalassa 46 — 4-cabin sailing yacht, Athens | Meltemi Blue
From €3,900 / week · In stock: 9 weeks open · 4 cabins · 10 berths
2. sailhub.example
Thalassa 46 charter Greece — compare prices
3. boatbookr.example
Rent Thalassa 46 in Athens
Next passage
If marketplaces outrank you for your own products, we start with the feed and the schema, then build the pages around them.