I agree with you. Tracking rankings and competitor performance is very important in SEO. Sometimes targeting less competitive keywords first is the smarter way because it helps build traffic and authority gradually before going after bigger keywords.You need to track your current ranking, clicks are in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd page. You can spend ages doing SEO, if you don't perform better than your competitors won't see results. You should focus on less competitive keywords even if less traffic is gained.