How to do keyword research for Hindi and regional search
Build a keyword list for Hindi and regional language search when the usual tools report almost no volume for the phrases your customers use.
The tools report nothing and the customers are real
A business serving customers who search in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or Bengali runs the phrases through a keyword tool and gets zeroes. Meanwhile the WhatsApp enquiries arrive in exactly those words. The conclusion drawn is that there is no demand. The correct conclusion is that the tool cannot see it.
Volume data for Indian language queries is sparse, inconsistently transliterated and often collapsed into the English equivalent. A phrase typed in Devanagari, the same phrase typed in Roman letters and the same phrase spoken aloud may be three separate records or one, depending on the tool. Research here has to be built from observation rather than from a volume column.
What this work does not include
Keyword research for regional search excludes translation of your website, and translation is where the real cost sits. A list of Hindi phrases is useless without pages written in Hindi by somebody who writes it natively. Machine translated pages read badly to customers and tend to be treated as low quality by search engines. If you are not prepared to fund native writing then stop at the research and use the findings to improve your English pages instead.
It also excludes the decision about script. Serving customers who type in Roman letters is a different content decision from serving customers who type in Devanagari, and doing both means more pages. Your own time to listen to calls and read enquiry messages is the main input. Any research fee carries GST at 18%.
Who needs this, and who is wasting money on it
This matters where the purchase decision is made by somebody who thinks and types in the language. Agricultural inputs, local services, health information, government scheme assistance, education for first generation learners, consumer goods sold in smaller towns. It also matters for any business whose call recordings show customers struggling with English product names.
It is a waste for a business selling to urban professionals, to procurement departments or to any buyer who works in English all day. A B2B software company, an export consultancy or a corporate law firm will find that its buyers search in English even when they speak Hindi at home. Building regional pages for those buyers produces pages nobody reads and dilutes the site.
How to build the list without volume data
Start with your own records. Read six months of WhatsApp enquiries, call notes and comments on your social posts and extract the exact words customers used for the product, the problem and the price question. The mixed forms are the data. A customer asking for the cheapest water pump in a sentence that is half Hindi and half English is showing you the query.
Then expand using autocomplete in the language. Type the phrase into search in Devanagari and in Roman letters and record every suggestion for both. Do the same inside YouTube, which carries heavy regional language demand. Then check the People Also Ask results and the related searches at the foot of the page, which are generated from real queries and cost nothing.
Then group what you have by meaning rather than by spelling. One intent will have five transliterated spellings and you cannot build five pages. Pick the spelling your customers use most in their own messages, write the page around it and include the main variants naturally in the text. Finally rank the groups by how close each one sits to a purchase, since that ordering is the only prioritisation you have in the absence of volume.
Judging the result
The metric that matters is enquiries in the language, counted per page. Ask whoever answers the phone to record the language of each caller for a month. If the Hindi pages are working then the mix shifts. Pair that with the query list in Search Console filtered to the pages you built, which will show which spellings actually bring clicks.
The metric that flatters is the count of keywords you now rank for. Transliteration variants multiply that figure quickly and most of the variants carry no traffic. A report showing four hundred new ranking keywords in Hindi and no change in Hindi speaking callers is reporting spelling permutations.
The common mistake
The expensive error is translating existing English pages word for word. The English page was written around English queries and the translated version targets phrases nobody types. It also carries the English page's structure, which rarely matches how the question is asked in the other language. The result is a page that ranks for nothing and reads like a manual.
The second error is building one page that mixes both languages to cover both audiences. It serves neither. Search engines struggle to identify the page's language, and the reader sees half a page they can use. Separate pages, separate URLs, each in one language.
A caveat on data quality
No tool currently gives reliable volume figures for Indian language queries and no figure quoted for the share of Indian searches in regional languages should be accepted without a named source and a date. Build from your own customer language, publish a small set of pages and let the query reports tell you what to do next. That is slower than buying a keyword list and it is the only method here that rests on evidence.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.