Help selecting KWs based on their difficult to rank for and KW tool question

[aircyclemegan]

I've done all of my keyword research, and now I'm selecting the KW's. In a previous question, seomoz had answered to pick a mix of easy, medium, and difficult words to rank for. How do I know which are easy, medium, difficult? The KW Difficulty Tool is not very specific.

Is the level of difficulty related to where the phrase pops up for my company in search results? Are hard words ones that you do not already rank in the top 50 search results? When selecting KWs should I choose words that rank already in the top 50 that I'd like to try to move up? Or look for NEW phrases/words not in the top 50 results?

Also, when entering KW phrases int the KW Difficulty Tool, Rank Tracker, and in Campaigns - do I need to use quotation marks if it is a phrase? I noticed that the KW difficulty tool has different results if you use quotation marks.

Lastly, The person who did SEO before me has a list of KWs he optimized for, would it be valuable for me to include his words in my On-Page optimization efforts?

[aircyclemegan]

But should I choose terms that we rank for in the top 50 results to try to move us up, or choose terms that we're not even in the top 50 yet? (Or a little of both)

And our competitors do have high DA/PA Scores and MozTrust Ranks, but I think it'd still be smart to target some of their KW phrases I noticed they rank for and my company shows up after them, correct?

[aircyclemegan]

Thank you.

But should I choose terms that we rank for in the top 50 results to try to move us up, or choose terms that we're not even in the top 50 yet? (Or a little of both)

And our competitors do have high DA/PA Scores and MozTrust Ranks, but I think it'd still be smart to target some of their KW phrases I noticed they rank for and my company shows up after them, correct?

[DavidKauzlaric]

When choosing a term to rank for, in my experience, choosing a term that has low competition means finding sites that rank top 10 that do not have high domain/page authority scores, relatively low moztrust/rank, and of course really low backlinks. If a site has 10 backlinks, as long as they're from sites that are under 50 DA, they're easy to rank for.

The reason you get different results from KW Difficulty Tool using quotation marks is because that tool pulls the top 10 google results for whatever term you put in. Generally, the top results are different when using quotations. I recommend you NOT use quotation marks when using the KW difficult tool.

I would do your own research and optimization and stay away from using someone elses work/data, to me, it seems prone for errors and miscalculations which lead to loss of money, time, and other potential fallout.