Boat Owners Don’t Pinch Twice

“Be straight with me. Does the phone stuff actually cost me work, or is it just something you people sell?”

The marina owner asked it with about forty seconds left on the call, after nine minutes of me explaining things he’d half heard before, in the tone people use when they suspect a question is rude.

It isn’t rude. It’s the best question anybody asks me, and it’s the one I answer worst, because it always arrives when someone’s already reaching for their keys.

He got the rushed version, because the call was over and his mechanic was standing in the doorway with a part in his hand.

He was owed the long one. So here it is, a few months late.

First, what the check is

Mobile-friendly is a pass or a fail, and it means your page works at phone width without the reader having to do anything to make it work.

Doing something means pinching to make the words big enough to read, or pushing the page sideways because a line runs off the edge of the screen, or aiming at a link that has another link sitting on top of it.

All three belong to the way a page treats the person reading it, which is a bigger subject than one pass or fail.

That’s it. The test has no opinion whatsoever about your photographs, your logo, your prices or whether the website is any good.

Which is worth saying out loud to an industry that photographs beautiful objects for a living and takes real pride in how they look.

Where your trade lands

Badly, and I’d rather you heard it from me than from a stranger with a monthly fee attached.

72.2% of the marine websites I opened cleared that check, which is 44 of 47. No other check I run on this trade finishes lower.

I sampled 774 marine businesses across 17 markets to get there, so what you’re looking at isn’t one unlucky marina in one unlucky town on one bad afternoon.

And 78% clear the same check across everything I audit, which tells you nobody’s holding boat people to some cruel private standard. Everyone else’s customers own the same phones yours do.

Speed isn’t your trouble, by the way. One yard owner tried to pay me to make his pages quicker, and I sent him home with his money.

So does it cost you work?

Yes. The cost simply never arrives labeled as a cost.

Think about what has to happen before a stranger reaches your website at all. She has to want the thing you sell, search for it, read a list, and pick you out of that list.

That’s the expensive part of the whole business of getting found, and you already won it before she ever saw a photograph of your yard. Then she lands on a page she has to operate with two fingers.

Have you ever done that on a company you’d never heard of before? Pinched, dragged, given up, gone back?

There were four other yards on the results page behind her, and she’s still got the tab open.

What the cost never does

It never emails you. It never leaves a review, never complains at the counter, never mentions it when you see her at the ramp in July.

It shows up as a quiet week in June that you put down to the weather, or a season where the storage list came in shorter than last year and nobody could tell you why.

I can’t hand you a number for it, and I want to be honest about that. Nobody can, and anybody who quotes you one is guessing with a straight face.

What I can hand you is which side of the line your trade sits on, and yours sits on the wrong side by more than any other check I run on it.

Why this trade in particular?

Three reasons, and not one of them is laziness. I’ve met plenty of you and lazy is not the word I’d reach for.

Your website is a photo album. Wide shots of hulls on cradles, galleries built to be looked at properly, on a real screen, by someone who cares about boats as much as you do.

Wide is what breaks a page on a phone, and a gallery is the widest thing most of you own. The rate card and the slip chart come a close second, because both of them arrived as tables and tables were never designed to fold.

Furniture stores sit even lower than you do on the same check, and the owner I sat with was certain nobody buys a couch on a phone anyway.

Then there’s the season. You touch the website in winter if you touch it at all, and the fellow who originally built it in 2018 has moved on to a different line of work entirely.

So the site ages a year at a time while phones change every few months, and nobody in the building is watching that gap open up.

And 82.8% of marine businesses have a website, so owning one stopped being any sort of advantage years ago.

Yours no longer wins you the job. It just quietly loses you a few.

The answer I used to give

For a couple of years I answered that question with a warning about Google instead. Sort this out or you’ll slide down the search results, and your competitors will go past you.

I stopped saying it, because I couldn’t put the proof on the table when a skeptical man asked me to. Selling anything I can’t show you on a screen makes me feel like the people who email you reports.

What I can show you is a woman standing on a dock with your homepage open in her hand, doing work she never agreed to do, with the rest of the search results still sitting one tap behind her.

So the answer has nothing to do with search rankings, and it never did. It’s about the ten seconds of her attention you’d already paid for and then made her spend on pinching.

Now argue with me

Maybe you think boat people are different. Your customers know you already, they find you through the marina office, the work comes off the docks and off the phone, and none of it starts with a search.

I’d like to hear it, and I’m not being polite about that. Send me your website with the reason attached, and if the reason holds up I’ll say so in writing.

If it doesn’t hold up, I’ll tell you which part of the page is the guilty one, and you can go and get it fixed by whoever you like. I’d like it to be me, since marine websites are most of what I build, but the fix matters more to me than the invoice does.