The trouble isn’t the complexity of the optimization; it’s the complexity of the game. Even focused companies should have target keyword lists that number into the thousands and retailers or larger organizations often need to address tens or hundreds of thousands of different words and phrases. Optimization results that only address a dozen or two ‘keywords’ is like having a great fairway shot but being incapable of hitting the ball from the rough or sand. Putting it in business terms, imagine if your phone number was only in the Yellow Pages of 2% of the people who tried to find you – that’s your situation if your ‘optimization’ only yields top5 ranking for 2% of the terms real people search when you’d like to get their business.

Beyond keywords, you have Yahoo and MSN and the rest of the non-Google universe. Studies show that the top ranking sites vary greatly between these engines, and even if Google has nearly 70% share (as some have recently claimed), are you really ready to walk away from 30% of your potential customers? On top of this we have nearly constant algorithm changes, a world where getting a contextually-relevant non-paid link from a legitimately credible and highly ranked site is just slightly easier than getting six PowerBall numbers right, web designers who think text segments longer than 16 words are visual anthrax, and competitors who seemingly gain their rankings through either the world’s most insane combination of ‘black hat’ techniques (sure they’ll get banned, but when?) or because they built their site on a whim in early ’96 and haven’t changed it since and yet Google still seems to love them and their decade old back-links.

The real world process of SEO isn’t plant then harvest. It’s research, plan, execute the easy parts, lobby for extensive site changes, measure initial results, investigate why some efforts worked and others didn’t, re-double efforts and change tactics where necessary, win some internal battles to build more content or make more radical page changes, get very creative to build or attain meaningful links, wait around for results, react to algorithm changes, figure out how to measure results in a world where all the tools suck, repeat.

SEO is easy. Great organic search results are extremely difficult. They take many months and years. They require nearly endless SEO hours and a commitment to change the site dramatically to give the engines what they want – this means costs from designers, writers, webmaster, engineers, etc. It ain’t cheap, it ain’t easy. So is it worth it?

Over $6B is spent on paid search because it’s easy to understand and highly predictable. And it works. But last I heard seven or eight out of ten clicks were still in the organic listings. So if you buy the #1 spot for every keyword possibly related to your business you’re still missing nearly 80% of your potential traffic.

And despite all the cost and effort described above, organic traffic carries no variable per-click cost, and so it gets cheaper the more successful you are. Algorithms and competitors may change, but generally speaking the organic rankings you earn tend to hang-on for months or even years. So the amortization of the fixed costs spreads even thinner over time.

In the end the question isn’t how hard it is to optimize, it’s how difficult is it get results – and what are those results worth. The inside-baseball debate will continue among the search guru’s, but for marketers wrestling with these issues I hope the above ads some texture to the issues at hand. I didn’t even make it into the issues of paid search or the comparison between the two, and will tackle those in a subsequent post.