Wordtracker and KEI: Our results, your feedback

[bcurry]

Question for you experts. We recently hired a consulting company to help us with our SEO efforts and after 6 months of complete dissatisfactioin we are attempting to imrpove things on our own.

We have been successful in running a PayPerClick campaign and have a good amount of information related to our industry, searching patterns and keywords.

Our first foray into keyword analysis for SEO, using WordTracker, resulted in NO terms with a KEI over 3! Our industry (help desk outsourcing) seems to be extremely competitive and it has a relatively small amount of search terms that produce the most targetted results.

So what are your thoughts on this? With a KEI so abysmally low does it even make sense to attempt SEO? Are we missing something? Should we ignore the KEI and attempt to achieve results anyway?

Feedback or thoughts would be appreciated.