Let me explain. Most everyone who's ever climbed mountains above the tree line in the summer or played around on a rock wall at an outdoor equipment store has had at least a passing thought about how cool it would be to do winter climbing. Very few actually do it though. The thought process quickly shifts to, "if only I were more fit, if only I knew someone who could teach me technical climbing skills, if only I were a bit crazier, etc."
While organic search is no winter climb, it can be intimidating until you develop a grasp of the basics. Most assume that it is a lot harder and more expensive than it actually is, and that it means competing with mega companies for the coveted page one positions. If only...
Well as it turns out the competition is generally not as tough as you might think. Properly segmented, most B2B product markets have between ten and fifteen competitors, and usually fewer than half of them do a good job optimizing their sites. Page one position is attainable surprisingly often. The key is in how you define your markets and the keywords that you optimize for, to go after them.
Consider for example a small manufacturer of precision ground gears. They could define their business in general terms like gears and compete for search position with literally hundreds of manufacturers, many quite large, most (interestingly) manufacturing other types of gears.
Or they could use more specific using terms like machined gears, or even better, precision ground gears and end up competing with four or five manufacturers. Not only would getting good results page position be comparatively easy with the more specific keywords, but the traffic to their web site would be better focused and a whole lot more productive.
You can test this with your own products pretty easily. Develop a list of keywords starting with general words and getting increasingly more specific as you break your market into finer segments. Plug each word into Google and scan the results pages to get a sense of who your competitors would be, and how tough it might be to get a decent position. You'll be surprised at how quickly the competition for position drops off when you select you keywords this way, aligning them with the market segments that you are actually competing in.