Content marketing isn’t just a way someone dreamed up to keep content writers harmlessly employed. It’s an inbound marketing technique that uses the way internet search works to try and draw an audience to your business offerings via highly visible and attractive brand-related content. A good content strategy should bring you measurable results in your search rankings as well as your sales pipeline. So let’s take a look at the sites that consistently rank highly in search engine results and see what we can learn from them. A combined study by Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch  based on a sample of 1000-3000 searches in March 2012, suggests that- while Wikipedia is a leader in SERPs, Amazon dominates the scene and YouTube is emerging as a serious contender. What are our takeaways from these statistics? First of all, let’s forget trying to game Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn’t structured that way, and its huge army of volunteers is standing by making sure that you don’t use the site to try and gain mileage for your brand. It’s a different story if your brand is already established and of encyclopedic interest, but even then you do not have control over how you are represented. The rise of Amazon gives us two very useful cues:

• Get on Amazon. If you have a product that can be sold on Amazon, get it out there and benefit from their search supremacy.
• Learn from Amazon. In some ways, Amazon is like a content site that also sells stuff. They have extensive details on each product and a wealth of editorial and user-generated content about the things they sell. Creating a content-rich site and allowing users to weigh in can only help boost your search rankings.

A couple of other cues are:-

• Get on YouTube. The rise of this site, and sites like Vimeo, shows that people love consuming video content. Sites like these are full of product demos and reviews and by uploading a great video related to your brand, you can help kick off a rewarding online engagement and rise in the search rankings.
• Content marketing supports sales and marketing; it is also increasingly a vital underlying component to a good SEO strategy

The more useful, entertaining or just generally engaging content you put out there, the better. However, it helps to have the assistance of a team of content specialists with a strong business orientation – a team like i-Vista’s Digital Marketing department.  So don't wait and contact us now!