How Popular is Pilates in Philadelphia?
Posted By: Pamela Toy
I am sure you will agree when I say that Pilates is seen by most as a similar form of exercise to Yoga.
A lot of people thought it was a fad that would eventually die off.
Well as of now, Pilates has withstood the test of time and is utilized by many people including top athletes like Lebron James and Antonio Brown.
Given that my studio is located in Philadelphia, I wanted to take a deep dive and look at how popular Pilates is in Philadelphia.
We are going to zoom out and check how it has trended since 2004.
In our analysis, utilizes data from the following 3 sources: SEMRush, Google Trends, and Google Search Console.
Let’s go ahead and dive in.
Google Trends Analysis of Pilates
Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.
Looking at the topic Pilates (we are looking at it specifically in PA), Google Trends is showing huge interest in 2004. There is a big drop off from 2004 to 2005 and then another slight dropoff after 2008.
Let’s get more granular and search for Pilates Philadelphia.
As you can see, the trend is fairly similar however the slight decline in interest occurs around September of 2011.
However, Pilates Philadelphia is trending at its highest since December of 2012. Considering COVID, it’s amazing to see this search query/topic trending upwards after 9 years.
Pilates Near Me Terms:
If we check for Pilates Near me – Note there is only data starting in 2013 for this query.
However, it looks like August 2019 peaked interest. It came down a bit, (most likely due to COVID-19) and now is seeing a heavy increase in search interest.
It’s hard to say because data is only available in 2014, but as search engines like Google became better at showing relevant and nearby results, people started typing in Pilates near me versus Pilates Philadelphia.
Reddit Analysis of Pilates Search Terms in Philadelphia
Using advanced Search operators, popular forums like Reddit.com/r/philadelphia/. There aren’t a whole lot of questions around Pilates.
This is all time also and Reddit Philadelphia was created all the way back in 2008. Now, this only shows pages indexed…
If we use their actual search bar, only 4 results show up and only 1 is asking for topics related to Philadelphia.
Compared to Reddit Yoga, there are significantly more threads asking about Yoga Studios in Philadelphia.
Quora Analysis
Let’s check another forum like Quora…
Using advanced search operators, we check for quora.com and check for any threads with the keyword Philadelphia and pilates within any of the comments…
It looks like nothing was returned, which indicates nobody has asked a question regarding this recently.
SEMRush Analysis
Next, we will use an SEO tool called Semrush that provides estimated organic search volume for a given query/keyword.
This is third-party data and may not be 100 percent accurate, but it can definitely give us a better understanding of a topic’s popularity on Google.
Looking specifically at the estimated search volume we will examine the following keywords:
Pilates Philadelphia, Reformer Pilates Philadelphia, Mat Pilates Philadelphia, pilates studio Philadelphia and Pilates Philly.
We can see the keyword mat pilates get an average of 10 searches per month.
Reformer Pilates gets an estimated 20 searches a month.
Pilates studio gets an estimated average of 100 searches per month.
Pilates Philly gets an estimated x searches a month
Finally, Pilates Philadelphia gets an estimated average of 720 searches a month.
Given these are all localized queries, there is still a decent amount of search interest in Philadelphia.
Google Search Console Data
Lastly, we will look at Google Search Console Data. Google Search Console gives much more accurate data because it tells you how many times people have actually searched a given keyword.
The one caveat with search console data is it will only tell you the impressions and clicks each query has based on the keywords you are currently ranking for. The way an impression works is if someone types a keyword and you are ranking in position 10, but they don’t scroll down to view your page, that still counts as an impression despite your page not being within their view.
However, if you are ranked on page 2 and they don’t venture to page 2 of Google, it won’t count as an impression.
So the caveat here is that the data is only super accurate if you are ranking on the 1st page throughout the course of an entire month. You can clearly see some of our keywords are tethering with an average position of 9-10, so we may not have captured all the impressions over time.
With that being said, this data gives us a much better representation of how many people are actually searching a given keyword.
The data I am using in this analysis is from July 12, 2021 – August 11 2021.
We can see over the last 30 days the keyword Pilates Philadelphia received the most impressions (495), followed by Pilates studio Philadelphia (256).
This gives us a much better representation than SEMrush’s estimation.
Let’s take a look at our near me terms.
We can see keywords like Pilates near me and pilates studio near me have received way more impressions than any Philadelphia-specific terms.
The one caveat here is that we may show up for near-me terms for areas outside of Philadelphia as well. However, for the most part, Google is pretty good at only showing your results to people within a geographic location.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of historic data over the last couple of years, otherwise, I would do a deep dive to see how things have trended over time.
There you have it!
I believe it’s safe to say that Pilates isn’t going anywhere and has cemented its place in the exercise world. If you aren’t convinced, I wrote this post on 6 reasons you should do Pilates if you live in Philadelphia.
Interest for Pilates in Philadelphia isn’t nearly as high as yoga, but there seems to be a steady amount of interest over the last 3-5 years.
Additionally, search interest around Pilates near me is trending upwards since 2014 (minus covid lockdown months).
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Data Methodology/References
- 1. Google Trends
- 2. Reddit.com
- 3. Quora.com
- 4. Semrush.com
- 5. Google Search Console