@neoanderson For search volume use Keywords Everywhere, bulk export from SEMRush and into KE (It's a chrome extension, 100K SV for $10).
Keyword difficulty scores are mostly garbage, however, for bulk analysis they are somewhat effective. You should instead filter your lists by keyword length >= 4, this way you'll get mostly long tails that are for the most part not going to be as competitive (you will still have to do competition analysis). If you want to take this a step further, place an additional filter for KW difficulty 20, 10 or less. Whatever you want.
Once you have a filtered list, copy and paste every keyword in google search for manual analysis and look for the following characteristics (in order of difficulty low to high):
1.
Easiest: Forum threads, reddit, quora, and any user generated content sites showing up in the top positions targeting or not targeting your keyword.
2. Easy: Weaker sites in top positions. To judge site strength I use the free MOZ DA bar. Look for sites <= DA 30. Yes DA can be manipulated, but in large quantities, it is statistically significant because the majority does not inflate DA with spammy practices.
3. Still Easy: Authority sites appearing in the SERP but are not targeting your keyword, they are there because google has nothing else to show. If they are not satisfying search intent, then you can beat them with some site age and minimal links to your home page (not the page you are trying to rank). You just want some authority going.
For a new site, I wouldn't go beyond these three points. Spend time doing keyword research upfront so you have a content map. Cluster your keywords, which is basically grouping all similar keywords together and then write your content in clusters so you can interlink all related articles with each other and then move on to the next cluster. Write your content for the reader. Cater to the search intent, and fuck everyone else. You want to answer the search query better than your competition.
Good luck!
