While some of you may be wondering what exactly happened to day 3, well, it pretty much went by in a blur. Spent most of my time writing the content for my home page, and the rest was spent "tweaking" it via the feedback provided by the helpful people in the WA chat. Then the rest of my time was spent listing some more ribbon in my other shop whose website I have put on the back burner for the time being. 

After a hectic weekend of errands, and hours spent at my parents house troubleshooting computer issues, I took a mini-break from working on my site, cause on a Monday morning after a bad nights sleep, the last thing I wanted to do was attack the keyword research that I knew was next on my to do list. 

Having always struggled with this step in the process, I re-read the steps outlined in the 30 Day Success Plan, and at with only 9 keywords out of 25 I hit a wall. Regardless of the keyword that I entered into the Google Competition tool, all delivered the same "View Results" result. My previous understanding was that "View Results" meant that they keyword entered had too high of a competition, which I now know was an incorrect assumption. 

After countless tries, I found myself getting quite frustrated since there was no possible way that every long-tail keyword I entered had that high of a competition ratio.  So, before I sent myself off the deep end, I headed over to the WA chat to ask for help. Luckily Kyle was around and he was able to set the record straight on the metrics I needed to keep an eye out for going forward. Here's what I learned:

 1. The "View Results" result does not mean high competition, it means that the tool was unable to determine the QSR of the keyword entered. Which can occur when a keyword may be entered too frequently. (My mistake, since it worked fine when i tried it again at a later point) Clicking the "View Results" will give you a 1 out of XX rating, where the XX is the QSR.

2. Jaaxy is the prefered keyword research tool if you have it

3. The best keywords in Jaaxy have a QSR under 400

4. If Jaaxy returns a "Retry" result for QSR and SEO, validate the keyword in quotes in Google. Most likely the keyword may have no current competition and usefulness of the keyword will depend on the estimated monthly traffic. 

Now that I see this written in front of me, I can't help but wonder why I struggled so much with keyword research in past. I knew I had to find keywords with low competition in Google, yet no one ever told me about the intricacies of the tools we use here at WA. Luckily I had the right people to turn to who put me back on the path to success and saved me from banging my head on the figurative wall for hours on end. I now find myself with a renewed confidence that success is possible, and all it takes is having the right group of people who you can lean on, when needed, to help get you there.