Joe, can I just ask......??
when you go to a customer's house and they have used a vax/bissell/rug doctor...
do you get annoyed and say something like "why did you not get a professional in ?"
well websites and the t'internet are the same thing... Why not stick to running a business and cleaning carpets, and let a t'internet professional do the website and seo sort of stuff?/
Only askin like.. 
Im paying Creare £336 per month to do my seo.
They are a large and established company and when I signed up they claiemd to be able to bring me around 1000 high quality visits per month & I decided it was worth it.
That was in Sep/Oct last year & despite being on first page for most of the chosem keywords as of the last month or so I am still not seeing much result, in the way of leads, at all. Wenever my adwords goes offline, sales come to a halt. So I am looking to go my own way & start manually optimizing & link building.
£336 is only for 2 locations (Norwich & Yarmouth) and they charge much more per additionial location. The articles they wrote havnt really added much quality info to my website. To be fair they are not carpet cleaners, so I cant expect them to write quality content on carpet cleaning, however the last article they wrote me for my blog contained very similar content to an article I had published myself for the very same blog, a week or so before - which makes me think they hadn't read my blog.
In short, I cant afford it (over £10 a day) and its not yet bringing me much leads at all.