Should your website have Hindi pages? When a second language is worth it

A lot of Indian business websites are in English because the owner, the agency and the person writing the brief all work in English. The customers often don’t. They speak Hindi, Marathi or Tamil at home, type in Hinglish, and increasingly ask Google questions out loud in their own language.

That doesn’t mean every business needs a Hindi website. It does mean the question deserves a proper answer instead of a translate button in the footer.

Why this is a live question now

Two things have changed.

First, Google’s search features have caught up with Indian languages. AI Mode added Hindi in September 2025 and, in October 2025, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. In March 2026, voice search through Search Live came to more Indian languages. People who were never going to type a long English query can now just ask.

Second, AI answers are built from text. If the only Hindi content about your service is on a competitor’s page or a directory listing, that is what gets quoted. We covered how Google treats these features in what Google asks of your website for AI Mode.

For scale: in the 2011 Census, 43.63 percent of Indians reported Hindi as their mother tongue, as Scroll’s analysis of the language data set out. Mother tongue is not the same as preferred search language, but it gives you a sense of the audience.

When it’s worth it

A second language tends to pay off when:

• Your customers talk to you in that language. Look at your WhatsApp chats and call recordings. If half your enquiries come in Hindi, your website is the odd one out.
• You serve a specific region. A clinic in Nagpur, a coaching centre in Patna, a builder in Coimbatore. Local customers search locally, often in the local language.
• Your service is explained, not just listed. Insurance, healthcare, education, legal and financial services, home loans, government-scheme help. People want to understand before they call, and understanding is easier in your first language.
• You already run ads or WhatsApp campaigns in that language. Sending a Hindi ad to an English page breaks the conversation at the worst moment.

It’s usually not worth it yet when your buyers are businesses that work in English, when you can’t maintain two versions, or when the site itself still has bigger problems. Fix a homepage that doesn’t explain what you do before you translate it. Our five questions your homepage should answer is a good check.

Start with one page, not the whole site

You don’t need to translate everything. Pick the one page that brings the most enquiries, usually your main service page, and build a proper version of it in the target language. Then watch it for two or three months in Search Console: impressions, clicks and the queries it shows up for.

If it earns its keep, add the next page. If it doesn’t, you’ve spent a small amount to learn something useful.

How to set it up so Google finds it

Google’s guidance on multilingual sites is clear on the basics:

• Give each language its own URL. For example /services/physiotherapy and /hi/services/physiotherapy. Google recommends separate URLs over switching language with cookies or browser settings, since it might not find versions that only appear dynamically.
• Use hreflang. These tags tell Google which pages are translations of each other so it can show the right one, for example en-IN and hi-IN.
• Translate the content, not just the menus. Google warns that translating only the boilerplate while the main content stays in another language makes for a poor experience.
• Let people switch. A visible language link on each page, pointing to the same page in the other language, not back to the homepage.

Machine translation needs a human

AI translation is good enough for a first draft and not good enough to publish unread. Google’s spam policies list automated translation among the techniques that can count as scaled content abuse when it’s used to churn out low-value pages.

There is also the plain customer problem. Literal Hindi translations of English marketing copy often sound stiff, like a government circular, or use words nobody actually says. Many urban customers write in Hinglish and would find “shuddh” Hindi odd. Decide the register on purpose:

• Hindi with common English words (“appointment”, “booking”, “EMI”) usually reads most naturally for service businesses.
• Keep product names, prices and technical terms consistent across both versions.
• Have a native speaker who knows your customers review every page, ideally someone who has talked to those customers on the phone.

Don’t forget the rest of the journey

A Hindi page that leads to an English-only form and an English-only WhatsApp reply undoes the effort. Check that:

• The form labels and error messages are translated.
• Your team, or your AI receptionist, can reply in that language.
• Your Google Business Profile description and posts match.
• Ads and landing pages use the same language end to end.

How we can help

When we build a business website, adding a second language is planned from the start: separate URLs, hreflang, a language switch on each page and content written for the region instead of run through a translator. For sites that rely on search, our SEO service can show you which queries in which language are worth chasing before you spend on translation.

One good page in the language your customers actually speak will do more than a full site in a language they only put up with.