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Bill Dalton went online one day in 2005 only to find that his nurse uniform sales business had been scrubbed out of the top search engine results.

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The Charlottetown, PEI small businessman had relied on certain key words for years to drive traffic to his business's Web site, Scrubs Canada.

But all it took was one major search engine's routine formula shakeup to wipe him out from the coveted top 10 results.

“The search engine got a cold, and so did I – because I was no longer in the top results,” Dalton recalls.

Now he'd have to find another way to draw eyeballs to his online uniform sales page.

For Dalton, the answer was paid search advertising.

He bid on narrowly focused key words, and geographically-targeted his campaigns to keep payments low and Web hits high. The Maritimes businessman knew he'd hit success thanks to three words - “tall nurse scrubs.”

“I decided just to try the key words in an ad, and I saw immediate results – that day, and ever since,” he says. “If I was selling cars, it would be very expensive. But I'm a small businessman so it's cheaper.”

As Canadian consumers increasingly turn to the Web for business and recreational activities, advertisers are lagging further behind, industry insiders note.

They say traditional media giants appear stuck in a mass-message groove and aren't spending big bucks on wooing Web surfers, despite the significant amount of time Canadians spend online.

“Today consumers spend anywhere from 20 to 30 per cent of their free time online, but marketers only invest about seven or eight per cent of their money in online advertising,” says Owen Sagness, vice-president of Toronto-based MSN Canada.

“There's a big gap between where the money is being spent and where the eyeballs are.”

With consumers rushing online, there's opportunity for smaller businesses to compete with Bay Street bigwigs, according to Kenneth Wong, professor at Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ont.

“Online advertising is one of the last marketing bastions that doesn't depend on big scale to be successful,” he says.

Nor is it something traditional advertising agencies tend to do very well, he adds. “Even those who claim to be fully integrated often only have one or two guys sitting in a closet somewhere.”

Major search engines offer self-service approaches to online advertising that is easy for a small business or individual to set up.

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