I think you'll find your experience with an SEO firm was fairly common (if not universal). They over promise and can't possibly deliver without a longterm (ie. prohibitively expensive) involvement with your company. The company I work for hired some of the bigger companies (SEOInc.com, Bruce Clay) and they provided some good advice. However, at the end of the day, it was up to me to implement the technical side of things and our SEO/SEM manager to work on the long term stuff. Plus, the knowledge they provided is either readily available or some new trick which is prone to change over time. Both firms cost a fortune (well, I consider it a fortune).
Save your money, hire someone junior but clever, give them 6 months to work on it part time--tell them not to try anything blackhat/fishy. I think you'd get way better bang for your buck. (They can start by adding METATAGS to the first (most important?) category (Egyptian Hookah) in your menu--Google says that keywords/description aren't that important anymore but every SEO consultant is going to tell you to do them first)...
You are sitting on a goldmine having a copy writer. Most longterm SEO is developing legitimately interesting content to encourage high-quality, inbound links. Have your copy writer colleague spend an hour or two a week writing Hookah Articles (I'll read them--always been a bit intriqued by them) and in a year your site will be killing it....
Comments
I think you'll find your experience with an SEO firm was fairly common (if not universal). They over promise and can't possibly deliver without a longterm (ie. prohibitively expensive) involvement with your company. The company I work for hired some of the bigger companies (SEOInc.com, Bruce Clay) and they provided some good advice. However, at the end of the day, it was up to me to implement the technical side of things and our SEO/SEM manager to work on the long term stuff. Plus, the knowledge they provided is either readily available or some new trick which is prone to change over time. Both firms cost a fortune (well, I consider it a fortune).
Save your money, hire someone junior but clever, give them 6 months to work on it part time--tell them not to try anything blackhat/fishy. I think you'd get way better bang for your buck. (They can start by adding METATAGS to the first (most important?) category (Egyptian Hookah) in your menu--Google says that keywords/description aren't that important anymore but every SEO consultant is going to tell you to do them first)...
You are sitting on a goldmine having a copy writer. Most longterm SEO is developing legitimately interesting content to encourage high-quality, inbound links. Have your copy writer colleague spend an hour or two a week writing Hookah Articles (I'll read them--always been a bit intriqued by them) and in a year your site will be killing it....