What It Is, How It Works, & How Ahrefs Does It

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to pull customers in with relevant and useful content.

Coined by HubSpot’s founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the goal of inbound marketing is creating content to:

1. Attract potential customers.
2. Engage and teach how your product or service can solve their problem.
3. Delight by going above and beyond to help them find success with your product.

Together, they work like a flywheel.

How to do inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is our core marketing strategy at Ahrefs. We create helpful content that teaches our customers SEO and digital marketing while promoting our product, exactly like the post you’re reading now.

Here’s how we use inbound marketing at Ahrefs:

Attract

Ranking in organic search is the main way we attract potential customers. We chose this channel for two reasons:

1. Consistent traffic – By ranking for topics people search for, we can attract traffic to our content month aftermonth.
2. Highly targeted – By writing about the problems our product helps to solve, we attract the right people at the righttime.

For example, we rank #1 for “how to do affiliate marketing”:

According to Google Search Console, this post has attracted 58,000 clicks over the past three months:

All of these people are potential customers because they’ll struggle to do affiliate marketing without a keyword research tool like Ahrefs.

To find the best topics to write about, we do keyword research. Here’s the process:

1. Go to...