Yes, a new site should go after genuinely winnable low or zero-competition terms first, with one firm caveat: those terms must still carry real demand and relevance. The pivot is winnable and still has demand. Early rankings on terms you can actually take give you traffic, engagement, and the index trust that lets you compete for harder terms later. But zero competition that exists because nobody is searching is worthless, so the goal is not the easiest possible term, it is the easiest term that real people are still looking for and that fits what your site is about.
This sits between two tempting mistakes. One is to chase the big head terms immediately to look established; a new site rarely has the authority to rank for those, so you spend months producing pages that never surface and learn nothing. The other is to grab any term with no competitors, which often lands you on phrasing nobody types, earning rankings that bring no visitors. Both fail for the same reason: the first ignores winnability, the second ignores demand. The useful zone is where competition is low enough to win and demand is high enough to matter.
The reason starting here works is that early wins compound. When your first pages rank and satisfy the searchers who arrive, you accumulate signals that you cover a topic credibly, and that emerging trust makes your next, slightly harder pages rank faster than they would have on a cold domain. You are not just collecting small wins, you are building the foundation that lets you reach for the competitive terms with a real chance. Skip this stage and you are asking a domain with no track record to do something it has not earned.
For your next batch of pages, list the terms you are considering and score each on two axes: can a new site realistically rank for it, and does it still have enough genuine search demand to be worth a page. Start with the terms that clear both bars, and treat any term that wins only because no one cares as a term to skip.