As the saying goes, “Know yourself, know your enemy, and win every battle,” and this phrase nicely hints at a key aspect of a good SEO strategy: knowing your search competitors.

A search competitor is a search for email list competitor sites that are in the same domain as your own and have search visibility. Search visibility is the visibility of a website in search engine search results. You need to know who your opponents are in the search engines (understand their tactics) because that's where SEO takes the most effort.

Even if you know who your traditional industry competitors are, keep in mind that they're not "search" competitors if they're not competing for the same keywords as your site.

How can you easily find real online competitors? There are many ways (using a search engine) and free and paid tools to help. Here are six quick and easy tools to help you with your competitor research:

Get Ready: Identify Your Keywords

Before you start, you need to know the key terms (and rankings) your site is targeting. If you do not have a keyword list or ranking list, it is recommended to use Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Moz Keyword Explorer to collect keywords. If you need to know how to collect keywords, you can read this keyword research guide. However, not all keywords and phrases are created equal: pay special attention to phrases with medium and medium average search volume (meaning a high or moderate number of searches for a particular keyword in a month) and an achievable difficulty Grading. Once you've identified key search terms, it's time to find your competitors.