Questions about ranking in Google

Hi - I recently bought 10 articles at 1,000 words each in 10 different niches on all new websites. The 10 keywords I picked were chosen from Long Tail Pro with a keyword competitiveness of under 25. Out of the 10 only 3 are currently ranking and I'm wondering why. And when I say ranking I mean position 78 to 168.

My articles have my main keyword in the url, first sentence, h2 tag, then 3 more random times in the article. My image file name and alt tag is also my main keyword. My question is should the keyword also be under the h2 tag's section or does that matter? Is there anyone else I should be doing?

Is the reason I'm not ranking on the first page because I should of targeted a keyword competitiveness of under 20 and not 25 for new sites?

Should my articles employ some type of lsi keywords into the article as well? For example lets say I want to rank for "how to bet on college sports" is there a program that looks at the first page of google and sees what keywords those articles share so I can use those in my content.

Or should I just use lets say 5 random lsi words using: http://www.lsigraph.com/

Using the above example I picked:

Should I sprinkle these keywords in the article? Or do I need to do something different? Any advice would help. Thanks.