A Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or other Indian-language website pays off when your buyers read that language first — Tier-2 and Tier-3 retail, agriculture, education, local healthcare, government work — and is mostly wasted money when they do not. If you build one, give each language its own URL with hreflang tags, use Unicode fonts, have a human who knows your trade fix the machine translation, and accept that every future update now happens twice. If you cannot commit to that upkeep, translate five pages well rather than fifty badly.
When a regional-language website actually pays off
The best evidence is already on your phone. Check the language of your last hundred WhatsApp enquiries and calls. If a large share came in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or Telugu, an English-only site is making those customers work harder than they should. It is most common in:
- Tier-2 and Tier-3 consumer businesses — furniture, jewellery, two-wheeler dealers, hospitals and real estate in smaller cities, where buyers may read the local language more comfortably than English.
- Agriculture — seeds, fertiliser, drip irrigation, tractors, farmer producer organisations. A page a farmer can read in full builds more trust than a polished English one they skim.
- Education — state-board coaching and schools with regional-medium students, where parents read the fee and admission pages closely.
- Government and PSU work — central government sites are expected to be bilingual (Hindi and English) under the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW), and state bodies usually want the state language too. Confirm the current requirement in your tender, as of 2026.
When you do not need it
Exporters, B2B manufacturers selling to procurement teams, SaaS, IT services and premium urban brands rarely gain enough from a full second language to justify the upkeep. Many Indians also search in Hindi typed with English letters — sasta sofa set, ghar ka naksha — and an English page can often catch those with natural Hinglish phrases in its headings and FAQs. A cheaper middle path: keep the English site, add three to five regional pages for your main services, and add a WhatsApp button with a pre-filled local-language message.
Separate URLs with hreflang vs a language toggle
A toggle keeps one URL and swaps the text with JavaScript or a cookie when the visitor taps “Hindi”. Google indexes whatever the page shows by default, so the Hindi version effectively does not exist in search. Separate URLs give each language its own address (example.com/hi/, example.com/mr/), with hreflang tags linking the translations. Google’s own guidance recommends separate URLs over cookie or script-based switching.
| Factor | Language toggle (one URL) | Separate URLs with hreflang |
|---|---|---|
| Regional pages in Google | No — only the default language is indexed | Yes — each language can rank for its own searches |
| Build effort | Lower | Higher: URL structure, hreflang, sitemaps, switcher |
| Shareable Hindi link on WhatsApp | No — it opens in the default language | Yes |
| Good fit | Portals and apps behind a login, where search does not matter | Any public site that wants regional search traffic |
For most Indian businesses, subfolders (/hi/, /mr/) are simplest: one site, one hosting account, one admin panel. Subdomains work too.
Getting hreflang right
- Use a language code, optionally with the country: hi, hi-IN, mr-IN, ta-IN. A country code alone, such as IN, is invalid.
- Every version lists every other version and itself; links must be reciprocal or Google ignores them.
- Add an x-default, usually your English page, for languages you do not cover.
- Each language page canonicals to itself. Canonicalising the Hindi page to the English one tells Google to drop it.
- Never auto-redirect by IP address or browser language. Googlebot mostly crawls from US IP addresses without a language preference, so it may never see your regional pages.
- Set the lang attribute to hi, mr or ta. Google detects language from the visible text, but browsers, fonts and screen readers rely on it.
Fonts: Unicode, Noto and the Kruti Dev trap
Every Indian script has a Unicode standard, and your site must use it. The trap is content typed in legacy fonts such as Kruti Dev, which map Devanagari shapes onto ordinary keyboard letters: the text looks right only where that font is installed, and everyone else, including Google, sees gibberish. Convert it to Unicode and proofread the result, because conjuncts can break.
For the font, Google’s Noto family (Noto Sans Devanagari, Noto Sans Tamil and so on) is free under an open licence and covers every major Indian script; Mukta, Hind and Baloo 2 are good Devanagari alternatives. Design rules English-only designers miss:
- Indic fonts are heavier than Latin ones; load only the weights you use.
- Give Devanagari and Tamil more line height; tight spacing and hidden overflow clip the matras.
- No letter-spacing on Devanagari — it breaks the headline bar (shirorekha) joining the letters.
- Indian scripts have no capital letters, so uppercase headings cannot carry hierarchy; use size and weight.
- Translated text runs longer, and Tamil and Malayalam words are long; test menus and buttons with real copy.
- Store text as utf8mb4; an old latin1 database turns Hindi into question marks.
- Accept Devanagari digits in phone fields and convert them on the server.
Machine translation: a good first draft, a bad final copy
Google Translate and AI tools now give a usable first draft in minutes. Publishing it unreviewed is the mistake. The usual failures:
- Wrong register. Machine Hindi drifts towards formal, Sanskrit-heavy words your customers never say, where they would simply use the English loanword: delivery, booking, EMI.
- Labels without context. “Book”, “Order” and “Apply” each have several meanings; buttons translated word by word are where embarrassing mistakes live.
- Inconsistent tone. Hindi and Marathi have respectful and casual forms of “you” (aap and tum, tumhi and tu), and verbs change with gender; machine output often mixes them.
- Legal pages. A machine-translated refund or privacy policy can change what you promised; state which version prevails and have a lawyer check it.
Google has also long treated unreviewed machine translation as low-value automated content. The workable process: machine draft, an edit by a native speaker who knows your trade, then read every page aloud on a phone. If a sentence would sound odd across your shop counter, it is not finished.
Keeping two versions in sync
This is the part most proposals leave out, and why many regional versions quietly rot. Six months in, the English page shows the new price, the Hindi page the old one, and an offer that ended in March is still live in Marathi.
- Keep prices, phone numbers, addresses and timings in shared fields both languages pull from, not typed into page text.
- Use a multilingual setup (on WordPress, Polylang or WPML) that links each page to its translations, so gaps show.
- One rule: no English change goes live until its regional twin is updated, or the regional page comes down.
- Keep the regional version small: core pages in both languages, the blog in one.
Budget honestly: every content change now takes roughly twice the work, and someone who reads the language must check it. If your English site already goes months without an update, a second language will go longer. Our guide to website maintenance cost in India covers upkeep budgets.
SEO in regional languages: where competition is low
This is the real upside. For many commercial searches in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or Telugu, few well-built business pages compete. Test it in five minutes: search your main service in the language, on a phone. If page one is YouTube, Wikipedia, forums, government PDFs and clumsy translations, the gap is real.
- Research keywords in the language rather than translating English ones. Keyword Planner supports Indian languages, and Search Console shows real queries once pages are live, including Roman-script Hinglish ones.
- Write titles, meta descriptions and headings natively, not left in English on a Hindi page.
- Answer conversational queries. Voice typing is widely used, so queries run longer and read like questions; FAQ sections suit them.
- Be patient. Low competition is not no competition; expect months, not weeks.
Skip the shortcut of generating hundreds of machine-translated city or service pages; search engines penalise that pattern and it is expensive to undo. Our SEO services page explains how we plan regional search alongside English.
What a second language adds to the cost
The build side is usually smaller than people expect; translation and upkeep are larger. Figures assume a seven-page, 4,000-word site, as of 2026; get two or three translation quotes.
| Item | One-time or recurring | What drives it | Rough impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional translation | One-time | Word count; legal and medical text costs more | Typically ₹1–₹3 per word, so ₹4,000–₹12,000 here |
| Review by a native speaker in your trade | One-time | Usually your own staff | 1–2 hours per page |
| Language layer (URLs, switcher, hreflang, sitemaps) | One-time | Toggle or separate URLs; new build or retrofit | Small if planned from day one; more on an existing site |
| Unicode web fonts | One-time | Setup and testing on real phones | ₹0 in licences for Noto and similar |
| Design fixes for longer text | One-time | Menus, buttons and cards that overflow | A few hours |
| Forms, emails, WhatsApp auto-replies | One-time | How many messages the site sends | Often forgotten; list them before quoting |
| Keeping versions in sync | Recurring | How often content changes | Roughly doubles every update |
| Regional-language SEO | Recurring | Separate keyword research and content | Its own budget line |
For reference, our pricing at Codelith Lab starts at ₹24,999 + GST for a business website of up to seven pages, with extra pages at ₹1,999 each. Whoever builds it, get the language layer quoted in writing; our website cost calculator gives a rough figure for the rest.
Checklist before you launch a Hindi or Marathi version
- Confirm demand from your enquiries and a search in the language.
- Decide which pages get translated and which stay English-only.
- Use separate URLs in subfolders unless the content sits behind a login.
- Convert Kruti Dev or other legacy-font text to Unicode.
- Machine draft, then a human edit by someone in your trade.
- Add reciprocal hreflang, self-referencing canonicals and an x-default.
- Set the lang attribute and test fonts on a low-cost Android phone.
- Translate forms, error messages, thank-you pages, emails and WhatsApp replies.
- List every language version in your XML sitemap.
- Name the person who updates the regional version, and write the sync rule down.
The short version
- Build a regional-language site only if your customers read that language first; your WhatsApp enquiries will tell you.
- Use separate URLs with hreflang for anything public; a toggle is fine only behind a login.
- Unicode fonts, a human editor on top of machine translation, and native keyword research are not optional.
- The real cost is upkeep: every change happens twice, so translate the few pages that sell and keep them accurate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will a Hindi version of my site be treated as duplicate content?
No. Google treats a page and its proper translation as different content because they are in different languages. Problems start when the “Hindi” page is mostly English, or when it carries a canonical tag pointing to the English page, which tells Google to drop it. Give each language version a self-referencing canonical and reciprocal hreflang tags, and both versions can be indexed and rank for their own searches.
Can I just add a translate button instead of building a Hindi version?
For a portal or app behind a login, where search does not matter, a translate option is a reasonable low-cost choice. For a public site it adds little: Chrome already offers to translate any page, the output is unreviewed machine text your customers can see, and browser-side translation is not indexed, so it brings no regional search traffic. If you want Hindi or Marathi speakers to find you on Google, you need real translated pages on their own URLs.
Can I translate only some pages of my website?
Yes, and for most small businesses that is the sensible way to start. Translate the homepage, main service or product pages, pricing and contact first, and leave the blog in one language. Add hreflang only between pages that actually have a translation, and make the language switcher on untranslated pages lead to the regional homepage rather than to a broken link or an English page labelled Hindi.
Should the URLs of my Hindi pages be written in Devanagari?
They work technically and Google reads them, but Roman-script slugs such as /hi/ghar-ka-interior/ are easier to live with. Devanagari URLs are percent-encoded when copied, so a link pasted into WhatsApp or an email becomes a long string of codes that looks like spam. Keep the page title, headings and body text in Devanagari; that is where the language signal for search comes from.
Which font should I use for Hindi, Marathi or Tamil text?
Use a Unicode web font built for the script. Google’s Noto family, such as Noto Sans Devanagari or Noto Sans Tamil, is free under an open licence and covers every major Indian script; Mukta, Hind and Baloo 2 are good Devanagari alternatives. Never publish text typed in legacy fonts like Kruti Dev: it only displays correctly where that font is installed, and search engines see gibberish.
