In the digital marketing world, it may be the most frequent of all frequently asked questions – and it’s also among the most important: how do you attract more visitors to your website? 

Inbound marketing is a great strategy for various reasons: adaptability, affordability, effectiveness, etc. But for me, I like inbound marketing because of the simple idea at the heart of it: create content, attract visitors.

Quick: name a search engine. I’d bet my weekly salary that you named Google, and why wouldn’t you? It’s still the world’s biggest and most widely-used search engine, and it’s also the default search engine on every Android smartphone. Google runs the world, which is why every business website it trying desperately to rank more highly in its results.

What’s something you can’t get enough of online, but want to avoid like the plague on your commute? Traffic. Nothing can make us happier than seeing an online traffic spike month-over-month, just like nothing can make us sadder than seeing a major accident on our normal route home.

SEO can be a very difficult concept to master. It’s not hard to understand – SEO essentially measures how easily your site can be found through online searches – but it’s an incredibly competitive field. Almost every website in existence wants to have better SEO, and they’re each trying to outdo the other for search supremacy.

Good SEO takes significant time and effort to implement, partially because of how Google works. The world’s most powerful search engine plays a major role in inbound marketing, because a company’s website must be relevant in Google’s eyes in order to rank highly in search results. When that happens, your site will get more clicks, which means more traffic and then more leads.

There was a time when small businesses never had websites. The internet was a place for online-only businesses or major corporations. It was too expensive, too technical and far too much work to create a website for the mom and pop donut shop down the street or your local sporting goods store. But the world has changed quite a bit over the last few years. As the internet has become more and more a part of our daily lives, virtually any business can set up a website these days. There are also now a host of companies that are helping companies create websites, no matter how big, small or weird they may be.

With every new technological advancement, it’s often remarked about how the world has “become smaller.” The Earth never actually changes size, but it seems smaller because technology allows us to close the distance between one another in various ways (i.e. the telephone, railroads, air travel, etc.). The internet was one of the most revolutionary ways the world “shrank,” because it allowed us to start communicating instantly with virtually anyone around the globe. And for some reason, the internet fostered a spirit of collaboration and interaction like nothing else. From the very beginning with chat rooms to the popularity of sites like Reddit today, online folks have always seemed to want to get to know each other.

If a blog is published online and nobody finds it, does it make a sound? That’s a silly rip-off of a classic unanswerable question, but it brings up an issue worth considering: if you write great content for your inbound marketing strategy, how useful is it if nobody reads it?

There are many reasons inbound marketing has become one of the most effective and popular marketing strategies in the business world. For starters, it’s extremely cost effective – relying completely on the internet for marketing eliminates those expensive direct mail and traditional marketing fees. It’s also eminently adaptable; since everything lives online, you can change your website, messaging, content or email campaigns with just a few keystrokes. But perhaps the best part about inbound marketing is the fact you don’t have to go out looking for potential customers; instead, by creating informative content, you bring the potential customers to you.