Reasons not to use an SEO firm: 1) They don't want to understand your business, they just want to apply their cookie cutter approach and hope it works for your

Reasons not to use an SEO firm: 1) They don't want to understand your business, they just want to apply their cookie cutter approach and hope it works for your situation. 2) They make blanket statements like "you should only have 50 links per page!!" when you are an ecommerce company. The nature of your business means you will likely have more in order to deliver good usability to the customer. 3) They recommend no following a ton of your internal links to "sculpt page rank," even though Google changed the way page rank flows a year and a half ago so that doesn't work. Further, Matt Cutts has repeatedly said it doesn't make sense to nofollow internal links. 4) They write spammy articles created just for ezine and other article aggregators and tell you not to worry when the articles a) look spammy, b) aren't valuable content, and c) aren't 100% relevant. 5) They give you new h1, meta, and alt tags that have keywords for products you don't sell just because people search for them a lot. 6) I could go on. There are some real idiots in SEO. Maybe there are some good ones, but wow @ some of the firms we've worked with/are working with.