yoga_class

About This Post
Yoga was ranked #2 in the data on our fastest growing recreational activities post. I’m breaking this profile into 2 parts for brevity’s sake. This post will cover the following:

  • General Search Trends
  • Popular Forms of Yoga
  • Top Search Keywords
  • Demographics of Particpants

Part 2 will cover stock photography search results and trends and will link to this one.

General Search Trends – 2004 – Present; USA

google_insights_yoga

The chart above shows Google Insights for Search data  for ‘yoga’ from 2004 to the present day for the USA. There is a clear upward trend which you can see if you connect the peaks of the chart. In addition, like a lot of fitness-related terms (see our post on ‘weight loss’), there is a peak in January (resolutions anyone?) but a relatively steady volume of interest throughout the year.

Popular Forms of Yoga

yoga_types

The above chart shows Google Insights data for 2009 – Present for some popular forms of yoga. If you consider that Bikram & Hot yoga are thought of as the same thing then Bikram accounts for 84% of the above searches in Jan 2010.

Top 10 Search Keywords

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I ran a quick search on yoga and sorted the results by global monthly search volume. The Top 10 are plotted below:

top10_keywords_yoga

Participant Demographics

According to the Statistical Abstract  of the United States, there were 10.7 million yoga participants in 2007. In the charts below, the data are broken out by gender & age.

2007 Participation by Gender

part_by_gender

As anyone who has ever set foot in a yoga studio will attest to, the data above are not surprising. It would be interesting to track this breakdown over time and see how it is changing.

2007 Participation by Age Group

part_by_age

The peak age group is 25-34 but there is strong participation in the older bands as well. Over 30% of participants were 45 or older.

Conclusions

Couple at gym

  • Yoga searches peak in January.
  • Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
  • ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
  • Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
  • The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

Other Posts in This Series