An overwhelming 92% of American adults who use the Internet will search for a product, service, or for information at least once during the course of the day. If you’re a business owner, that statistic alone is likely enough to make you consider investing in search engine optimization, or SEO, in order to improve your online marketing efforts.

But perhaps more tellingly, more than half of business-to-business marketing professionals–57% in fact–state that SEO tools are the most helpful when it comes to creating leads. But in addition to the ubiquity of SEO marketing, there are other reasons to invest in bettering your search engine ranking.

For one, it is more cost-effective than other, more traditional means of marketing. For example, outbound methods such as “cold-calling” customers cost 61% more than inbound approaches such as search engine optimization. Another reason that SEO makes sense is the rising trend of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, which are set to usurp desktop computers as the primarily means of online access by the year 2014.

When it comes to specific search engines you should be focused on, achieving optimal results on Google is still the prize, since the search engine is at the top of the industry. Interestingly though, back when Google was only in the research phase, LEGO bricks served as storage for 10 hard drives which each held 4 GB that were being used to try out the PageRank algorithm that has since become so essential.

If you have questions, comments or tips to offer regarding online marketing, feel free to leave them in the section below.