Case Study: Respira App Competitor Off-Page SEO Audit

A competitor off-page SEO audit provides you with the link building strategies of your competitors and numerous link opportunities.

This will help you gain domain authority and organic traffic.

In today's issue, I'm presenting you a case study about Respira, to whom I applied my Competitor Off-Page SEO Audit course:

In a previous newsletter, and in my article “Case Study: Respira App Off-Page SEO Audit”, I've described in detail Respira App and the market of breathing apps.

I'll let you read the article for a bit more background on Respira, as well as to learn about auditing the off-page SEO of your own website.

Briefly, Respira is an app dedicated to improve your mental health through breathing. For instance, it helps to reduce stress, improve sleep, help you focus at work, etc.

Side note: I use it, and I do recommend it for all entrepreneur. Respira has a free plan, try it out.

First of all, let's start with Respira's direct business competitors, the other breathing apps.

Truth to be told, the breathing app market is deeply competitive with apps targeting breathing, stress-relief, sleep, mental health, serenity, sports performance, etc.

We selected these 10 apps for analysis:

Side note: Looking at your competitors self-description can help you find numerous seed keywords. I recommend you to add these keywords to your keyword list. It will be helpful when you will write content.

In order to gain clarity on the off-page SEO performance of the competitors, we created a Domain Rating map.

Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary measure of Ahrefs showing the performance of the backlink profile of websites.

You can use Ahrefs Free Website “Authority” Checker to find your own competitors' DR.

As you can see in the graph, 5 groups are made of websites with similar DRs.

Clear market leaders emerge, and clear immediate competitors emerge for Respira.

Side note: We have similar results regarding the Domain Authority (DA) from Moz.

To better understand what differentiate the competitors within the breathing apps market, we looked not only at the DR, but also at the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains.

We obtained the following graph:

The DR is expressed on the X axis. You can easily identify the 5 groups of competitors mentioned in the previous section.

A few learnings from the graph:

• Headspace and Calm are clear market leaders. These startups raised funds. For example, headspace raised money 13 times and has 30 investors. Translate this by “They have significant resources allocated to SEO and we won't be able to catch them unless we have similar resources”.
• Brain.FM is strong. Also a funded startup.
• While Oxygen Advantage has the 4th highest DR, it's number of backlinks and referring domains is not significantly higher than those from its next group of competitors. In other terms, if not the quantity, the quality of the links must be better.
• From a quantitative standpoint, to rank 4th best off-page SEO among breathing apps, Respira needs 8.3K backlinks and 1.6K referring domains.

From there, analyzing all the backlinks of the competitors above Respira makes sense.

We decided to start with Headspace, because obviously they build backlinks well.

While the industry competitor audit focuses on the market side of the analysis, the SEO competitor audit focuses on the consumer side of the analysis.

Indeed, now we put ourselves in the shoes of a typical customer searching on Google for a breathing app. Which keyword would they type?

Logically, the first keyword that comes to mind is… “breathing app”. Let's not complicate things.

A quick review on Semrush provides:

Key metrics:

• 590 searches in the US per month.
• 2.2K searches globally.
• Transactional customer intent: Users typing it on Google are most probably willing to download and use a breathing app.
• High keyword difficulty, 143 high DR referring domains will be needed.

Side note: “breathing apps” is an easier keyword to rank for. Noted ;).

The first 20 results on Google(.com), in the US, in English language, for the search “breathing app” are:

A few learnings:

• Top results are stores, both AppStore and Google Play. Makes sense for a keyword containing “app”. Hence the importance of App Store Optimization (ASO) for Respira.
• Forums such as Reddit and Quora are prominent. This is particularly true since the partnership between Google and Reddit. Reddit results will be everywhere soon. Respira better be present on Reddit from now on for SEO.
• YouTube videos, by Calm and The Pocket Mentor App, are well positioned. Google is driving traffic from its search engine results pages to YouTube. Makes business sense from Google's perspective as organic traffic feeds its YouTube monetization. Good news, Respira is already on YouTube. Give them some strength, subscribe. ;)
• App websites start appearing on page 3. Will be difficult to rank before page 3 for that keyword with a website.

We looked closer at the first 10 results. They are the ones the most seen by users:

Key learnings:

• DR of the top 10 results belong to [91;99]. You can't beat them.
• The specific pages ranked have backlinks among [28;527]. This means that on these platforms, i.e. Apple AppStore, GooglePlay, Reddit, Quora, and YouTube, 28 backlinks seems to be the bare minimum number of backlinks to beat competition.
• Regarding the referring domains, 19 is the minimum.

As mentioned in the Part 1, we selected Headspace for initial further analysis:

• 214,000 backlinks (source: Ahrefs)
• 3,000 backlinks exported (maximum allowed by BacklinkGap)
• 230 backlinks analyzed so far, based on the following criteria: DoFollow + HTTPS + Not disavowed + Working
• 30 referring domains worth noticing

Key learnings for Respira:

• Headspace is offered in numerous countries, and several languages. This offers a large number of backlinks from high DR/DA websites.
• And not only the App Stores pages are translated, but also the App itself.

Headspace has built links with personal development blogs related to:

• mindfulness, mindset
• productivity
• lifestyle
• meditation
• woman, mothering
• …

Its great for link diversity because of different domain names, registrars, CMS, keyword clusters…

Side note: This is the story of the egg and the chicken. We can't know if Headspace outreached or paid them to get listed and then got known, or if they got some other coverage such as press releases, and then some blogs talked about them. The truth is probably a bit of both.

Headspace has capitalized on Covid-19 and mental health issues to be distributed by a large market of career-related websites, such as:

• Schools
• School Districts
• Personal blogs of students
• Resource blog for students
• Professional organizations
• Human Resources services: to manage Covid
• Human Resources services: to manage working from home
• Human Resources services: to manage career and stress
• …

There are clear use cases for how Respira can be beneficial for students and employee, as well as their schools and companies.

There are multiple other link building activities, and I will list 2 additional below:

1.Tech blogs

Headspace has been the subject of Apple Developer, AWS, and Microsoft Learn. The advantage of being funded is that it helps you to reach companies you wouldn't have access to otherwise.

While being a family-run app and not a funded startup, Respira could still be the case study of their partners from their ecosystem.

Sure it's not going to be Amazon, but you have to start somewhere. This newsletter, which will become a blog article at some point, is an example.

2. Headspace Own Podcasts

Headspace created its own podcasts and made it available on all the major podcasts platforms.

These platforms are authoritative and provide link juice and traffic.

Of course, creating your own podcast, especially several of them, requires significant resources.

Still, you can always create some content and recycle it on multiple platforms.

1 big piece of video on YouTube, extracts as shorts on YouTube, TikTok… and use them in posts on other social media and platforms.

You've seen that we started by analyzing:

• the market side with 10 direct business competitors (Part 1),
• the consumer side with 10 SEO competitors (Part 2),
• the competitor that seemed the most relevant to find backlink opportunities (Part 3).

Part 1 taught Respira that to reach the 4th highest authority of the breathing app market, they should obtain 8.3K backlinks and 1.6K referring domains.

Part 2 offered Respira the link building activities they should take to rank for “breathing app” on Google.

Part 2 can also be reproduced for every relevant keyword, to find new link building opportunities and to better rank on these specific keywords.

Part 3 guided Respira on the link building activities they should undertake, and offered them concrete websites they should reach out to.

Part 3 can be pursued by analyzing more links from Headspace and by analyzing the backlinks of other competitors of Respira.

Respira has learned a LOT from this audit.

They obtained market data, competitors metrics, a better understanding of not only the market but also their place within their competitive group.

They also gained knowledge about what, where, and how to position themselves on other websites to rank early on Google SERPs.

Now it's your turn.

Use my course “Competitor Off-Page SEO Audit: The Fastest Path To Link Building”, and benefit from:

• My guidance with a clear 10 step process
• Beginner-friendly lessons
• 3 Google Sheet templates to make your life easier
• Only use 5 free tools to get everything done
• All your competitors off-page SEO strategies and backlinks right at hand!

It's your time to rank better with off-page SEO.