Marine

Website Design for Marine & Shipbuilding Companies

This working brief details how marine and shipbuilding companies can structure their online presence to secure inquiries. Readers will learn the required page sets, AEO plumbing, and specific UI blocks that prove yard capabilities to buyers within the first ninety seconds.

Proving Shipyard Capabilities in Ninety Seconds

A marine or shipbuilding buyer is not browsing. They are comparing. The decision lands on a yard that can prove three things inside the first ninety seconds: it builds what I need, it has done it before, and I can reach a human today. If your website cannot answer those three questions, the buyer is on the phone with the next yard on their list.

This pillar is a working brief for shipyards, marine contractors, boat builders, and offshore fabricators in India and the US who need a site, or a rebuild. It covers the page set, the components that pull in RFQs, the SEO and AEO plumbing that gets you cited by Google and by the answer engines buyers now use, and the recurring mistakes that keep yards invisible. Where a number helps, it is cited from our competitor benchmark scan we ran (n=1 sites, 12 pages), which gives one marine reference site as the baseline for what is normal and what is missing on yards today.

What the site needs: a page taxonomy that fits how marine buyers buy

Marine buyers move through four jobs: screen, compare, trust, call. The pages below map to that path so every road leads forward rather than sideways.

• Home. Headline with yard class and city, on-page stats block, hero carousel of builds, primary RFQ call to action, phone and WhatsApp visible above the fold.
• Services / Capabilities, one discipline per URL. Newbuild, repair, conversion, ship management, offshore fabrication. Each gets its own page because each has its own buyer.
• Projects / Fleet. Listing of vessels and projects with class, LOA, design DWT, year, and client sector. Tables, not paragraphs.
• About + Certifications. Yard size in acres or m2, ISO and class codes, employee count, and any sister yards. Compresses compliance work into a single skim.
• Contact + RFQ. A real spec form: vessel class, LOA, DWT, draft, propulsion, scope of work, delivery window, attachments allowed.
• Careers. Trade roles, apprenticeships, locations. US yards especially benefit from listing every yard under one careers URL.
• News and contract announcements. Class society, defence contracts, export wins. Keeps the home page fresh without rewriting it.

For India, services should also resolve at city level: newbuild Kochi, repair Mumbai, defence Pipavav, patrol Goa. For the US, state-level splits work: shipbuilding Louisiana, ship repair Mississippi, offshore Texas. Both markets converge on the same seven backbone pages; the city pages are the multiplier.

Components that convert: the eight that earn the inquiry

our competitor benchmark scan we benchmarked (n=1 sites, 12 pages) shows a clear baseline. Every page in the reference site ships an RFQ block, a stats block, a carousel, a phone number, and a WhatsApp link. What is missing on every page is a FAQPage schema and a real spec table. Build the eight components below and you start ahead of the pack. Build them on every page, not just home, and you stay ahead.

Two specifics on the spec table. Marine RFQ forms want vessel class, length overall (LOA) in metres, breadth, design draft in metres, deadweight in tonnes, propulsion type, scope of work, and delivery window. Render these as a real HTML table with units in the header row, not as a paragraph. Search engines and AI crawlers both read tables more reliably than prose for structured specs.

Two specifics on the stats block. Bollinger Shipyards' home page states 189+ vessels built for the U.S. Coast Guard, 3,800+ vessels built for government and commercial customers, 21 years recognised as the safest shipyard, and 63 Sentinel-class Fast Response Cutters. That block reads as receipts. Indian yards should match this shape with shipyard acreage, annual DWT throughput, and orderbook headlines from a recognised trade outlet like Maritime Gateway. Kirby Corporation, the largest US inland tank barge operator, runs the same shape on its corporate site: fleet count, segment share, vessel counts.

SEO plus AEO: what gets you found by Google and quoted by answer engines

SEO for marine is half keywords, half entity work. Modern search engines reward structured data and direct answers. Answer engines that buyers now use, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, reward the same structured data plus a readable text file. Treat them as one plumbing job, not two.

JSON-LD to ship on every site, in this order of impact:

• Organization. Legal name, yard addresses with areaServed, founding year, parent company, ISO and class codes, social profiles, sameAs list. Many shipyards operate multiple yards; spread address across each.
• Service, one node per discipline. NewbuildService, MarineRepairService, OffshoreFabricationService, VesselConversionService. Each Service connects to its OfferCatalog.
• OfferCatalog. Groups the services via hasOfferCatalog on the Organization or the relevant Service. itemListElement takes ListItem with a position property for ordered lists and Thing for unordered. Nest OfferCatalog inside OfferCatalog for category drill-down: newbuild, then patrol vessel, then 30m OPV.
• FAQPage. One per service page, paired with a visible FAQ block. our competitor benchmark had FAQPage schema on 0% of pages; this is the cheapest, widest win in the entire build.
• BreadcrumbList. On every non-home page so service URLs read with a trail: Home, Services, Newbuild, Patrol Vessel. Both markets use the same breadcrumb shape.

LLM plumbing you should also publish. The llms.txt file is now an open proposal, published on 3 September 2024 by Jeremy Howard. The spec lives the file at the root path /llms.txt, requires only an H1 with the site name, a blockquote summary, and markdown link lists under H2 headers; an Optional section lets the consuming model skip long-tail links when a shorter context is needed. Ship services, fleet list, yard locations, and contact. llms.txt complements robots.txt and acts as a curated, model-readable cousin of sitemap.xml; the spec is explicit that the file is meant for inference at answer time, not for training. A companion /llms-full.txt is worth shipping if your yard has long technical pages.

Keyword shape for the two markets. India: shipyard in Kochi, newbuild vessel Mumbai, offshore fabrication Gujarat, ship repair yard Kolkata, OPV builder India. US: shipyard Louisiana, ship repair Gulf Coast, OSV builder Texas, Fast Response Cutter builder, Jones Act vessel builder. Long tail: ISO 9001 shipyard with 200m dry dock. Cement each primary keyword in one H1, one URL slug, one Service JSON-LD node, and one FAQ Q&A.

Common mistakes that quietly cost you RFQs

Five issues come up at every intake. A sixth is more subtle but just as costly.

1. A homepage led by adjectives instead of yards and numbers. "Leading shipbuilder" is a stop sign; "137 acres, 12,000 DWT annual throughput, est. 1962" is an answer.
2. A contact form with a single textarea. Procurement officers will not use it. our competitor benchmark scan shows an RFQ block on 100% of pages; the lift is real vessel fields, not a checkbox.
3. No city pages. India and the US both buy locally first. A yard without a Kochi or a Pascagoula page loses to a yard that has one.
4. Specs only in PDFs. PDFs are unsearchable, untranslatable, and unreadable to most crawlers. Pull every spec into an HTML table on the page.
5. No FAQPage schema anywhere. our competitor benchmark had FAQPage schema on 0% of pages. One schema block per service page is two hours of work and the highest-return change on the build.
6. Silent URL renames. Marine buyers bookmark services/newbuild or share it in tenders. A rename without a redirect map costs you the link. Map every legacy URL before launch.

FAQ

What does a marine website cost to rebuild? For a yard with 30 to 100 service pages, expect a fixed scope, not hourly. Plact ships a marine site build as a fixed price based on page count and integrations; a typical mid-size yard lands in the mid-five-figure USD band, including copy assistance, JSON-LD, and the llms.txt file.

How long does it take to launch? A rebuild with the seven backbone pages, 8 to 15 service pages, and the FAQ plus schema layer ships in 4 to 6 weeks once copy and project photography are in hand. Indian and US yards run on the same timeline; the variance is in approvals, not code.

Do you handle multilingual content? Yes. India-facing builds ship in English plus one regional language by default. English-only is fine if your orderbook is export-led; add Hindi, Tamil, or Malayalam if your orderbook is domestic.

Will the site be cited by AI answer engines? The site ships the same JSON-LD, the same FAQ blocks, and the same llms.txt file that answer engines use as the citation surface. Whether a given query lands your yard or a competitor's depends on the underlying service pages and the trust signals on them; we ship the surface that gets you cited when buyers ask.

About Plact

Plact is a B2B website studio at plact.work. We build and rebuild sites for shipyards, marine contractors, and offshore fabricators across India and the US. Every build ships the page taxonomy, the eight conversion components, the JSON-LD layer, and the llms.txt file covered above.

Next step. Send your current URL and the cities you serve to plact.work. We reply with a fixed-price rebuild plan, a page count, and a launch date. No sales call, no follow-up sequence, no NDR. ```