High-quality content is a “competitive must” for businesses looking to up their customer acquisition figures via SEO, especially in Google’s post-Panda realm, according to the marketers at Brafton.

The following infographic shows a case study of a sales management business that increased its organic search traffic, amid Google’s Panda update, by use of frequently updated blog posts and Tweets, while also boosting its number of referring keywords by 150%.

Content is king. It’s the mantra being rung from all corners of the search-marketing world, as the effectiveness of paid links peters out and SEO success looks increasingly social. Google has indicated their “+1” button has a large effect on page rank. Same goes for a Facebook “Like,” through Bing.

However, with $12.5bn in content spend estimated in the next year alone, the mantra should really be: (high-quality) content is king. Competition will be fierce, and companies can’t afford to be left behind.

Google’s Amit Singhal sums it up the feeling with some questions marketers should ask themselves about their site content, specifically: Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend or recommend?