2021 was a year like no other. With it came the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Local and regional travel began to resume, and conversations around mental health, burnout, and work-life balance were at the fore.
This reality was reflected in the interactions people and businesses had online. Health and wellness have been on many people’s minds over the last two years, and it shows in the word and terms they enter into the search engines and social media.
Let’s look back at which keywords and hashtags were trending for the retreat and wellness communities in 2021. Doing so may help your wellness business have the right online conversations this year and going forward.
SEO has a crucial part to play in your online strategy. To make sure that your digital content reaches the right people, you’ll need to work specific keywords into it.
Wellness keywords are exactly what your target audience is searching for. If you target the right keywords and offer the right content, you’ll gain a lot of relevant traffic.
All of this is free traffic that can deliver long-term results. Bringing people to your website where you can capture their details gives you an opportunity to create and build relationships with them.
You can use wellness keywords in your blog posts and on your website to gain better search engine visibility.
You can also use them to optimize videos on YouTube and create the right kind of social media content.
In general, when you uncover the terms that your audience uses to discover your type of business and offering online, you can better understand what they are interested in.
With that knowledge, you can shape your marketing strategy to meet your ideal clients online.
When doing your keyword research to identify suitable keywords to target in your content, there are several factors to consider.
If you use a specialized tool like Ahrefs to help with research, you would look at:
This refers to the number of times the keyword is searched per month.
A higher search volume indicates more demand for the keyword, which could mean more traffic to your website.
However, high-volume keywords are generally more competitive and have a broader search intent.
Keyword difficulty is the term used to describe how competitive the keyword is based on the number of pages trying to rank for it.
The lower the keyword difficulty, the easier it will be to claim the top positions on search engine results.
Then there’s search intent. This is what the user wants to find out when searching online.
For example, if someone entered ‘wellness retreat in California’ into Google, it’s clear that they want to go on a wellness retreat in California and are looking for retreat listings.
But, if someone searched ‘wellness retreat,’ they could be looking for all kinds of answers. They might want to know what a wellness retreat is, what happens at a retreat, or where the closest retreats are.
Whatever keyword you use, always be aware of search intent and create content that matches this.
Wellness keywords continuously change based on your audience’s online behavior.
This means that it’s important to stay up to date with wellness keywords that your brand can use.
Numerous SEO tools exist to help you find relevant and up-to-date keywords for your wellness business.
These tools offer some fantastic insight to improve your online visibility.
Wordstream is an excellent free online tool.
It allows you to check what keywords your competitors are ranking for, get ideas for the wellness industry, and narrow down the results to be relevant for your state or country.
Ubersuggest has free and paid options. Using the free tool, you get a limited amount of daily free keyword insights.
Enter a domain or keyword, and the tool will reveal valuable data, including keyword and content ideas.
Keywordtool.io is another useful free online tool.
You can use it to generate hundreds of long-tail keywords, questions, and related prepositions based on the search term you enter.
Long-tails can be useful as they often have a more focused search intent and lower difficulty.
Ahrefs is often considered the industry standard when it comes to paid SEO tools.
Use it to gain deeper insights into keywords, backlinks, competitor analysis, content gaps, and more.
To help you understand which keywords were trending in 2021, we’ve broken them down into several categories.
The heading is the main search term, and the keywords below are the broader related topics and search queries.
| Keyword | Search Volume |
|---|---|
| mental health retreat | 4.4K |
| wellness retreats near me | 4.4K |
| health retreat | 1.3K |
| detox retreat | 590 |
| best wellness retreats | 720 |
| healing retreats near me | 720 |
| World tour package | 170 |
| mental health retreats near me | 1K |
| health retreat near me | 720 |
| relaxation retreat | 590 |
| fitness resorts | 590 |
| health and wellness retreats | 590 |
| mental health wellness retreat | 480 |
| mental wellness retreat | 480 |
| holistic retreat | 480 |
| Keyword | Search Volume |
|---|---|
| virtual retreat ideas | 170 |
| virtual retreat activities | 50 |
| virtual staff retreat ideas | 50 |
| virtual team retreat ideas | 40 |
| creative virtual retreat ideas | 10 |
| virtual team retreat | 40 |
| fun virtual retreat ideas | 20 |
| virtual spiritual retreat ideas | 10 |
| virtual company retreat | 10 |
| virtual company retreat ideas | 10 |
| Keyword | Search Volume |
|---|---|
| bookyogaretreats | 590 |
| yoga retreats near me | 2.9K |
| bali yoga | 480 |
| yoga holiday | 590 |
| yoga weekend | 110 |
| ayurveda retreat | 390 |
| island yoga | 320 |
| tantra retreat | 390 |
| best yoga retreats | 390 |
| yoga meditation retreat | 390 |
| Keyword | Search Volume |
|---|---|
| silent retreat | 5.4K |
| vipassana retreat | 1K |
| spiritual retreats near me | 3.6K |
| vipassana meditation retreat | 1.9K |
| meditation retreat near me | 2.9K |
| silent meditation retreat | 1.3K |
| buddhist retreat | 1K |
| mindfulness retreat | 880 |
| silent meditation | 480 |
| silent retreat near me | 1.6K |
While keywords will bring you more visibility on search engines, wellness hashtags will increase your reach on social media.
Visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok rely heavily on hashtags. Hashtags can also be used on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Instead of paying to promote your content, the right hashtags could do this for you.
Hashtags can connect you with a much larger audience, and improve the discoverability of your social posts.
If you want to get more views, followers, and engagement, then using hashtags will help you succeed.
Wellness businesses can use hashtags to connect with specific online communities. Hashtags can be used to discover trends within your niche, find influencers to work with, and help make your content appear on the Discover and For You pages of relevant audience members.
You can find wellness hashtags by searching for them directly on social media sites.
This should reveal the popularity of those hashtags in descending order. You could also go to your Discover or For You feeds, and see what hashtags trending posts are using in your niche.
The more popular a hashtag is, the better. If you use hashtags that are currently trending, you’ll be able to tap into a lot more potential social media traffic.
For this wellness hashtag guide, all of the hashtags are based on data from Instagram. Just like the wellness keywords listed above, these hashtags are structured by the main hashtag heading with related hashtags underneath.
| Hashtag | Posts |
|---|---|
| #wellness | 53M |
| #wellnessjourney | 3M |
| #wellnesscoach | 2.7M |
| #wellnessthatworks | 1.2M |
| #wellnesswednesday | 1.7M |
| #wellnessblogger | 1M |
| #selfcare | 56M |
| #mindfullness | 2.4M |
| #mindfulliving | 2M |
| #mindful | 3.9M |
| #mindfulness | 31M |
| #mindfuleating | 1.3M |
| Hashtag | Posts |
|---|---|
| #yoga | 103M |
| #yogainspiration | 14M |
| #yogapractice | 12M |
| #wellnessthatworks | 1.2M |
| #yogalove | 12M |
| #yogaeverywhere | 9.4M |
| #yogachallenge | 9.4M |
| #yogaeveryday | 9.2M |
| #mindfulliving | 2M |
| #yogateacher | 8.8M |
| #yogaeverydamnday | 19.8M |
| #yogapose | 7M |
| Hashtag | Posts |
|---|---|
| #retreat | 3M |
| #retreatyourself | 163K |
| #retreatfood | 8K |
| #wellnessthatworks | 1.2M |
| #retreatcentre | 13K |
| #yogaretreat | 1.9M |
| #retreatlife | 85K |
| #retreatvenue | 17K |
| #retreatleader | 9K |
| #retreats | 454K |
| Hashtag | Posts |
|---|---|
| #meditationtime | 461K |
| #meditationteacher | 291K |
| #meditationmusic | 211K |
| #meditationcoach | 149K |
| #meditationretreat | 139K |
| #meditationiskey | 117K |
| #meditationroom | 109K |
| #meditationchallenge | 86K |
| #meditationtools | 115K |
Every year the top wellness keywords and hashtags echo our living reality.
When you compare 2021’s top terms with 2020, it’s evident that wellness, self-care, and whole health are still exploding. The number of posts and searches on specific terms have increased from one year to the next.
After another year at home, it’s not surprising.
This sentiment is reflected in the wellness industry’s latest predictions too. By 2025, the industry is expected to be valued at nearly $7 trillion.
With knowledge of the most recent trends, you are able to take these into your conversations with your clients, colleagues, and vendors this year.