New domain vs expired

So I'm about to get a domain for my new niche site.

Are there any benefits of buying a fresh domain vs. buying an expired one with some PR and backlinks? Except that you get to choose the name ofc.

How important is the domain name? The keywords will be targeted on posts.

Your opening question is the answer. The benefit of buying an expired domain name is it already has PR and backlinks. This can give you a big boost in starting. You could purchase a bunch of expired high pr domain names, and build basic one page websites on them. You can then link them all together and you have your self a personal link network.

Well if the expired name is good enough, I would get it.

But if you have some more good new .com names, I would suggest to get it.

Atleast on the new names, you can control your link profile, on the expired names you dont know its link profile, it might be de index or penalized already.

Personally I like to plan ahead. I search through expired domains and auctions daily to find EMD or partials or relevant domains for my projects. PR2+ with a few high powered aged backlinks, if you keep looking you'll surely find a winner. Hard to beat registration fees for a PR3 domain that is an EMD for what you're ranking for. They don't even need to be .com's, other top tld's work fine.