One of the most fundamental aspects of doing keyword research in my opinion is KOB: Keyword Opposition to Benefit Analysis.
Todd Malicoat first developed this framework back in 2011. You can read his original post here. Now obviously, something that dates back to 2011 has been improved upon, and I wouldn’t necessary advice you to do things exactly the way he’s outlined in that post. But the principles of his method still remain true today.
A very simplified and practical way of conducting a KOB analysis is: Look at the keyword difficulty against the traffic value.
Use SEMRush or Ahrefs to determine the keyword difficulty and traffic value, they both have that metric built into their standard keyword research tools.
Now the original method requires some time and effort to get done.
One simple way to shortcut this is to run a competitor analysis. Keep in mind that a competitor analysis is most helpful when you’re doing it with a domain that has a similar domain authority to your own domain. (If you’ve got a DR 17 domain, and you’re up against a DR 65 domain, good luck trying to snatch up their rankings.)