The Situation
Paddle Board Outfitters rents pontoons, WaveRunners, kayaks and paddleboards in Somers, Montana, on the north end of Flathead Lake, and has been doing it for 15 years. Heading into the 2026 season, the phones and the booking calendar were telling the owner the same thing: fewer people were finding the business on Google.
The cause was not the business. A booking-platform migration had rebuilt the website, and the pages that used to rank for rental searches now returned errors. No redirects pointed the old addresses to the new pages, so the ranking history those URLs had built up went nowhere. Search traffic collapsed right before the months that pay for the year.
Our April 2026 audit showed how thin the new site was beyond the rental pages. It scored 19.1 out of 50 on our SCORE framework. Content Production scored 1.5 out of 10: one blog post, linked from three places on the site. Several jet ski pages carried titles and meta descriptions written for boats. Any operator who has changed booking systems or rebuilt a site will recognize the feeling of a business that is just as good as last year and half as visible.
Our Approach
The first decision was to stop the bleeding before building anything new. In March 2026 we documented the previously ranking URLs that now returned errors and mapped them to their closest new pages with 301 redirects. Where no equivalent page existed, we built a focused landing page. This was Site Optimization in its plainest form: give Google a working path from the old rankings to the new site.
Next we fixed the pages that make money. The owner told us pontoons and jet skis drive revenue, not paddleboards, so the homepage and keyword targets were reoriented toward Flathead Lake boat rentals. We rewrote the three most-visited activity pages, then audited all seven jet ski pages, correcting titles that described the wrong product and tightening specs, inclusions and calls to action. When the owner asked for a separate jet ski blog post, we recommended against it because the jet ski page already ranked and a second page would compete with it. We strengthened the existing page instead.
Content Production ran alongside the repairs. We built a Flathead Lake topic map and an internal linking map, then published steady articles on hiking, parks, state parks and outdoor recreation around the lake, each one linking back toward the rental pages. A blog archive went live in May so the articles were no longer orphaned. Every article was written to avoid implying a partnership with the local businesses it mentions.
Outside Signals came last in the sequence but started compounding quickly: 30 new business citations in late May, a rewritten Google Business Profile description, Apple Maps verification, and a 15th anniversary press release distributed in June. Evaluation tied it together, with 15 money keywords tracked from Somers and Search Console reviewed month by month.
The Results
By the end of June 2026, 14 of the 15 money keywords we track sat in Google’s top 10 organic results, and six held the number one position. Google Search Console clicks grew 272% in one quarter, from 149 in April to 554 in June, while impressions grew 162% and average position improved from 12.0 to 8.4. Between April 29 and June 29, “jet ski rentals near me” moved from position 28 to number one on desktop, “flathead lake pontoon rental” from 32 to 8, and “flathead lake boat rental” from 28 to 9. Referring domains reached 376 in June, four times the count a year earlier.
For the business, that means the core rental searches lead back to its own site again, and the biggest gains landed on the high-value jet ski and pontoon terms. The recovery is not finished. Growth is measured from a depressed starting point, and Google Maps local pack positions held flat over the same period, which is why citations and reviews lead the next phase.
How we measured this
- Metric
- Google clicks and positions for 15 tracked money keywords.
- Period
- April to June 2026 (clicks went from 149 to 554 a month).
- Source
- Google Search Console and rank tracking, from our Q2 2026 client report.
- Context
- This is a recovery from a site migration that happened before we started, so the growth is measured from a depressed starting point.
What Made the Difference
We treated the migration damage as the first problem to solve, not a footnote to a content plan. Redirects and page fixes recovered value the site had already earned, and new content only started compounding once that foundation worked. The second lesson is to put effort where revenue is. Prioritizing pontoon and jet ski terms, and protecting the jet ski page from a competing article, moved the rankings that matter most to the business. Any operator changing booking platforms should map old URLs to new ones before launch day, not after the phones go quiet.