
Calm Organic Growth Opportunities
1. Readiness Assessment
1. Readiness Assessment
2. Competitive Analysis
2. Competitive Analysis
3. Opportunity Kickstarters
3. Opportunity Kickstarters
4. Appendix
4. Appendix
Readiness Assessment
Current Performance
- Driving 1.1M monthly organic visits, valued at over $801k in equivalent ad spend.
- Your strong domain authority is reflected in a score of 70, supported by 383k ranking keywords and 56k referring domains.
- Your blog is a primary traffic engine, with top articles on topics like "mindfulness exercises" and "feeling overwhelmed" demonstrating a successful content strategy that resonates with user needs.
Growth Opportunity
- Significant potential exists in improving rankings for core, high-volume keywords like "mindfulness practices" and "meditation techniques," which each have 1.8M monthly searches.
- Your success with broad, top-of-funnel topics (e.g., relationship questions, personality types) provides a proven template for capturing new audiences through informational content.
- The homepage is your second most-trafficked page, indicating strong brand recognition that can be leveraged to promote new content and features.
Assessment
You have a dominant organic position built on a highly effective content marketing strategy. The data reveals a clear opportunity to scale this success by systematically targeting a wider array of high-volume wellness and self-improvement topics. AirOps can help you execute this content expansion to further solidify your market leadership and capture more traffic.
Competition at a Glance
An analysis of 2 direct competitors, Headspace and Insight Timer, confirms that Calm.com is the definitive market leader in organic search performance. Our content marketing efforts have established a commanding lead in the mental wellness and meditation space, placing us firmly in the #1 position for both organic traffic and keyword rankings.
Calm.com currently generates 1,064,398 in monthly organic traffic from 383,399 ranking keywords. In comparison, our nearest competitor, Headspace, attracts 395,820 monthly visits and ranks for 76,770 keywords, highlighting a significant performance gap in our favor.
This dominant position, with nearly 3 times the organic traffic and 5 times the keyword footprint of our closest competitor, underscores the success of our current content strategy. The data reveals a clear opportunity to leverage this momentum and further extend our market leadership, solidifying our position as the top destination for users seeking resources on sleep, meditation, and relaxation.
Opportunity Kickstarters
Here are your content opportunities, tailored to your domain's strengths. These are starting points for strategic plays that can grow into major traffic drivers in your market. Connect with our team to see the full traffic potential and activate these plays.
Generate a vast library of text-first meditation scripts optimized for unique combinations of audience, topic, and duration. This strategy targets high-intent users looking for immediate solutions to specific problems and funnels them directly into the Calm app.
Example Keywords
- “5 minute guided meditation for nurses”
- “guided meditation script for grief”
- “morning meditation for entrepreneurs”
- “10 minute meditation for exam stress”
Rationale
Calm already ranks for broad meditation terms but misses the massive collective volume from hyper-specific, long-tail queries. People searching for these scripts are actively seeking a solution and are therefore high-intent prospects primed to download an app that solves their immediate need.
Topical Authority
The company has strong domain authority and ranks for general meditation keywords. This play extends that authority into thousands of niche topics, leveraging their rich roster of in-house instructors and celebrity partners (Daily Jay, LeBron James, etc.) to demonstrate strong Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Internal Data Sources
Utilize existing course transcripts and taxonomies (topic tags, instructor expertise), user-survey personas and pain-points from product analytics, and program completion data to add powerful social proof like “X% of Calm users felt less [emotion] after this meditation.”
Estimated Number of Pages
4,000–6,000
Create thousands of pre-generated story outline pages where parents can find stories based on a specific moral theme, animal protagonist, and story length. This play captures the massive search volume for kids' bedtime stories and drives users to the Calm Kids app for the full, exclusive audio version.
Example Keywords
- “bedtime story about perseverance for 6 year olds”
- “5-minute dinosaur sleep story”
- “short kindness tale for toddlers”
- “interactive bedtime story generator”
Rationale
The long-tail market for kids' stories with specific themes is huge and currently served by low-quality, ad-heavy parenting blogs. This play provides a superior, structured, and trustworthy experience that leverages Calm's unique assets and brand safety, creating a powerful funnel for the Calm Kids subscription.
Topical Authority
Calm has a strong brand in sleep and an established Calm Kids product with exclusive voice actors and content. This play builds directly on that authority by providing a scalable entry point for parents, a key and valuable demographic, by meeting their highly specific search needs.
Internal Data Sources
Leverage internal story metadata (themes, characters, estimated read time), anonymized engagement scores from Calm Kids listens to recommend “fan favorite endings,” and the Getty Images integration to acquire thematic artwork for each story category at scale.
Estimated Number of Pages
3,000
Develop a comprehensive matrix of positive affirmations and journal prompts targeted by a user's profession, life stage, and specific emotional challenge. These highly-specific pages serve the growing self-help audience and act as a powerful lead magnet for Calm's in-app daily mood check-in features.
Example Keywords
- “affirmations for new moms”
- “journal prompts for burnout”
- “gratitude prompts for managers”
- “confidence affirmations for athletes”
Rationale
While Calm ranks for generic terms like “gratitude journal,” it misses the massive volume from verticalized long-tail searches related to specific life situations. This play captures users at their precise point of need with highly relevant content that has strong social sharing potential, creating a viral loop.
Topical Authority
The domain's existing authority in emotional wellness and mindfulness provides a strong foundation to speak on these topics. This play deepens that authority by demonstrating expertise across a wide range of life situations and professional challenges, showing a nuanced understanding of user needs.
Internal Data Sources
Use aggregated and anonymized mood-check statistics (e.g., “Top 5 emotions new moms log at 10 PM”), existing prompt libraries from the internal content team, and the Getty Images integration for persona-specific visuals to create data-driven, engaging content.
Estimated Number of Pages
2,500–3,500
Build an evidence-based encyclopedia defining lesser-known therapeutic approaches and mental health concepts not yet covered on Calm's blog. This strategy captures high-intent research traffic from users seeking help and builds significant clinical authority for the Calm Health B2B brand.
Example Keywords
- “dialectical abstinence skills”
- “somatic experiencing for PTSD”
- “internal family systems parts map”
- “paradoxical intention therapy for insomnia”
Rationale
A significant content gap exists for consumer-friendly, authoritative information on specific therapeutic modalities; current SERPs are a mix of clinical papers and low-authority blogs. This play targets users who are actively researching solutions, positioning Calm as a credible resource and funneling qualified B2B prospects to Calm Health.
Topical Authority
The domain has partial authority in psychology, and this play would significantly bolster it. Using AirOps’ human-in-the-loop feature for medical review is critical to establishing the necessary E-E-A-T to outrank competitors and provide safe, accurate information.
Internal Data Sources
Incorporate information from Calm Health’s clinical guideline PDFs, source unique quotes from their licensed therapist network to add expertise, and reference outcome data from Calm’s randomized controlled trials to substantiate claims.
Estimated Number of Pages
1,500–2,000
Create a dedicated, static landing page for every proprietary sleep and relaxation sound in Calm's extensive catalog. Each page will feature an audio embed, a description of the soundscape, and the science-backed benefits to capture high-intent users searching for specific audio environments.
Example Keywords
- “rain on a tent sleep sounds”
- “8 hour crackling fire loop”
- “Tibetan singing bowls for studying”
- “white noise for babies”
Rationale
The search volume for specific sleep sounds is immense and currently dominated by low-quality YouTube rips and ad-filled websites. Calm can easily win these SERPs by leveraging its unique, high-quality, and professionally produced audio assets combined with its strong domain authority.
Topical Authority
The domain already ranks for a few sound-related terms (“brown noise,” “432 hz”) and has immense authority in the sleep space. This play systematically expands on that core strength to capture thousands of related long-tail keywords, creating a deep moat of content around a core product feature.
Internal Data Sources
Leverage Calm’s internal sound file metadata (length, BPM, intended use-case), anonymized listening data (average duration, completion rate) to highlight popular tracks, and host audio snippets on a CDN for instant playback and engagement.
Estimated Number of Pages
1,200–1,800
Improvements Summary
Revise eight relationship-wellness blog posts to target high-volume, low-competition keywords and align titles, headers, and content structure with search intent. Expand articles, add internal links, rich media, expert quotes, and a new cornerstone hub page to improve rankings and user engagement.
Improvements Details
Update H1s and title tags to include exact match primary keywords such as 'relationship goals' and 'questions to ask a guy.' Expand each article to 2,000-3,000 words with list-style guides, FAQ sections, and a table of contents. Add internal links between cluster articles, embed expert quotes, include custom infographics, and launch a 4,000-word hub page linking all posts. Implement FAQ schema, breadcrumb schema, and optimize images for performance.
Improvements Rationale
These changes address current low rankings and zero traffic by matching content to user search language and SERP preferences. Longer, well-structured articles with strong interlinking and rich media are favored by Google for these topics. The hub page and improved internal linking will help build topical authority and drive more organic sessions.
Appendix
| Keyword | Volume | Traffic % |
|---|---|---|
| best seo tools | 5.0k | 3 |
| seo strategy | 4.0k | 5 |
| keyword research | 3.5k | 2 |
| backlink analysis | 3.0k | 4 |
| on-page optimization | 2.5k | 1 |
| local seo | 2.0k | 6 |
| Page | Traffic | Traffic % |
|---|---|---|
| /seo-tools | 5.0k | 100 |
| /keyword-research | 4.0k | 100 |
| /backlink-checker | 3.5k | 80 |
| /site-audit | 3.0k | 60 |
| /rank-tracker | 2.5k | 50 |
| /content-optimization | 2.0k | 40 |
Ready to Get Growing?
Request access to the best–in–class growth strategies and workflows with AirOps