It occurred to me that search engine optimization is a bit like the online equivalent of distribution........
in its ability to put your brand out there in front of a wide audience. 
And if distribution is perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage in marketing, does this point to how important SEO is, or should be?
Does it depend on what type of business you have, perhaps? 

One of the things we love about the web is surely that Davids can slay Goliaths in all sorts of categories.
(I just love how TradeMe, a competitor to eBay in New Zealand, succeeded in that country at eBay's expense. And was eventually sold to Australian media company Fairfax for around US$500m).

Undoubtedly, there are lots of Davids that became successful without any focus on SEO.
How?
Presumably they:
a) ended up with a pretty-well optimized site without consciously knowing what they were doing, and/or:
b) they had a product that the market wanted, the search engines saw this going on, and it translated to high rankings, and/or:
c) they've simply been around long enough that the search engines give them points just for this.

But if you're starting up an online business today, or starting to promote your business online today, how far can you get with the web as a distribution platform without SEO at the centre of your online marketing strategy?
Put it another way, how much of a gap are you leaving between the traffic you generate and the traffic you COULD generate if a serious SEO effort is NOT part of the equation? 

Your pre-existing competitors already have their place in the rankings.
And as a new entrant, you have to overcome their inertia and the credibility they already have with the search engines.

If you're lucky, they haven't been as focused as you're able to be.
And you can carve out a niche with valuable seed words and keywords that places you high in your prospects' the search results.

And if you're an established business that's seen its online traffic and leads fall away, you might have the same opportunity to claw back some of that territory from your competitors.

In other words, to reinvigorate your (web) distribution.
The way I see it, SEO is central to your ability to do that.
Is this just bleeding obvious?
Is SEO synonymous with distribution in a web world?
If so, is this an important idea, or just more of the bleeding obvious?