Special Report: Search Engine Marketing

From the beginning, SEM went hand-in-hand with the company’s e-commerce efforts. “I never saw SEM as something different from Web marketing,” he notes.

The company’s first SEM efforts came through Go2. As Overture built its pay-per-click model, Sea Eagle switched to that company and then to Google.

“For a small company like ours in a niche market, pay-per-click is ideal,” says Hoge. “People looking for inflatable kayaks [often] can’t find them in their local malls. And we’re very targeted, so we can outbid most other companies and get in most of the top listings,” he adds.