Case Study: Respira App Off-Page SEO Audit

I’m presenting you a case study about the Respira mobile app for whom I applied my off-page SEO audit course, as part of my off-page SEO audit service. Get your Free Consultation Call for more info.

In today’s issue:

While we all breathe unconsciously since birth, numerous breathing techniques have been developed to help people reduce anxiety and stress, facilitate sleep, increase work focus, balance emotions, and improve mental health.

If you’ve lived a bit and been through stressful situations, such as health issues, work stress and burn-outs, sports competitions, or school exams, you probably understand the value of being able to leverage your breathing to optimize your mental well-being. For instance, a doctor recommended me to practice cardiac coherence after my second burn-out. I’m well aware of the benefits of breathing consciously.

The market for breathing apps is ultra-competitive and several players are investor-funded startups at different fund-raising stages with complete marketing teams. You can bet that they are on point with their SEO.

Within that market, Respira is a family business that created Respira.app, an app dedicated to improve your mental health through breathing. If you know the myth David vs. Goliath, well, we are in such a case in which I support the underdog.

Respira is a guided symphonic breathwork app. By using Respira, users learn breathing techniques (e.g. 4-7-8 breathing, box breathing), learn to control their breathing, and learn to leverage their breathing to optimize their mental state and health (e.g. reduce stress, prepare for sleep).

The app’s advantage is its psychoacoustic soundscapes associated to the breathing practices. Fantastic sounds with the right frequency waves that reach your brain.

On the side note, I personally use it to improve my breathing and it really helps to enhance my well-being.

Respira is currently reworking their website, so we can’t optimize their technical and on-page SEO yet. We decided to start auditing their off-page SEO and we will follow up with off-page SEO optimization. The good news is that off-page SEO is a critical aspect of ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Regarding their business model, they have a free plan with several calming, activating, sleeping, and focus breathing sequences. They have an annual and lifetime paid plans with unlimited routines and additional features like breath-holding techniques. Their current website revamping will bring a new monthly plan.

On the table below, I compared Respira.app domain authority to that of 2 key competitors, Breathwrk and o-p-e-n. I used Apple as a gold standard anchor. As you can see, Respira has already done some work in SEO, but is mainly starting their off-page SEO journey.

On the contrary, its 2 competitors are actively improving their website authority. It’s worth noticing both competitors have a similar authority.

In the table below, I looked at the quantity (not quality) of both referring domains and backlinks. The numbers speak for themselves. The competitors referring domains are approximately 59 times greater than that of Respira. Obviously, this is a key improvement area.

Regarding backlinks, there is also a significant discrepancy between Respira and its competitors.

It’s worth noticing that both competitors have similar DA, DR, and PA, as well as around 1K referring domains each, yet the number of backlinks from o-p-e-n is vastly superior.

Looking at the backlink profile, there are 3 data we wanted to look at:

Firstly, the “link juice” is assessing the source websites that are transferring authority to Respira.app, called DoFollow links, versus the source websites that aren’t transferring authority, called NoFollow links. This profile is sane and looks natural.

Secondly, the link toxicity displays the number of source websites that can be considered by search engines as spammy because they link to poor quality websites. Actions can be taken to reduce this number.

Thirdly, the link velocity displays the number of backlinks that are gained and lost this past month. Respira is not currently building links, which is the reason why the growth is limited. Of course, this will be improved. :)

While we audited many other elements, including past link building activities, the evolution of backlinks and referring domains, the potential Google manual or algorithmic penalties…, the elements mentioned above are the most important.

We’ve discovered some competitors with strong metrics, and the next stage will be to dig deep into these competitors datasets to find link building opportunities for Respira App.

If you have a website, I can only recommend that you audit your domain authority and backlink profile to understand the potential off-page SEO improvements you can bring to increase your SERPs rankings.