Today, it’s hard to find any business that does not have a website and most business owners understand the value of showing up first on the major search engines.

Carlos Lagomarsino, HomeInsurance.com CEO and founder, has been able to build a successful business around the website and domain name.

Before launching HomeInsurance.com, Lagomarsino was running a local Allstate insurance agency. After expanding his agency to four states, Lagomarsino decided he wanted to become an independent agency and launched MystateInsurance.com in 2006, and about a year later, started HomeInsurance.com.

Today, the company represents auto and home insurance providers including Travelers, The Hartford, Safeco (a member of the Liberty Mutual Group), Progressive, ASI/Ark Royal and Foremost, and the website allows customers to get online quotes directly on the website.

“We stay with the larger national companies,” said Lagomarsino.

Today, HomeInsurance.com is in first position on Google for the term “Home Insurance” and employs more than 150 people in Wilmington.  The company was recently ranked at #61 on the Inc. 500|5,000 list of fastest growing companies in America for 2011.

The ranking, released at the end of August, places the company second in the insurance industry and reports the firm’s earnings growing 3,458 percent between 2007 and 2010, with 2010 earnings reported at $7.6 million.

Lagomarsino describes his business as “basically a technology company coupled with a marketing company coupled with a sales company. We are an Internet marketing company, first and foremost.”

He explained that staying on the top of the search engine results is a full-time job for his marketing team. The company has 10 full-time staff members dedicated to Search Engine Optimization, the process of convincing Google and other search engines, that your website is the most authoritative source of information on a topic.

“We have a blog, we write articles on insurance, we spend a lot of energy and resources to get the ranking,” said Lagomarsino.

All of the website’s technology is developed in-house and is based on open-source technology including Linux, Apache, MySql and Php, said James Freeman, CTO.

“We write all the website, CRM, rating technology all in-house,” said Freeman. Asked about the challenge of recruiting web developers, Freeman said “We are fortunate that we have not had a lot of turnover in our company, we are actually looking to hire another developer.”

The company is located on Carolina Beach Road in two adjacent buildings.

“We ran out of room (in the building they own), so we leased the space next door,” Lagomarsino said.

Currently all of the employees are in Wilmington, but “we may get a redundant location as we continue to grow,” he added.

In addition to the growth of the company, Lagomarsino is also proud that the company is a “100 percent debt-free organization, we did not have to go to private equity.”

Lagomarsino explained that many of his competitors are public companies that have raised investment capital to compete in this marketplace. For example, in 2010, QuinStreet, a publicly traded firm, purchased CarInsurance.com, Inc. and related entities for $49.7 million in cash, having previously purchased Insurance.com and Insure.com.

“You are more stable in the marketplace if you do not have to pay anyone back,” said Lagomarsino.