Why most Indian supplement search demand is not in English

Open almost any Indian supplement brand’s blog and you will find clean English articles about ashwagandha, gut health and immunity. Then look at how people in India actually search for those things.

The mismatch is the single largest content opportunity in this category, and most brands walk past it because English is what their agency writes and what their founders read.

This is how we think about it, written as the reasoning behind our own editorial plan rather than as generic advice.

The three ways Indians search

The useful mental model is not “English or Hindi”. It is three distinct behaviours, and they do not overlap as much as you would expect.

1. English. ashwagandha benefits, best protein powder India, vitamin D deficiency symptoms.

Who: urban, English-medium educated, researching. Also the whole B2B audience, brand owners, distributors, private-label buyers.

2. Devanagari Hindi. अश्वगंधा के फायदे, घुटनों में दर्द का इलाज, फैटी लिवर के लक्षण.

Who: Hindi-medium readers typing or dictating in Hindi. Voice search is a large and growing part of this, people speak the query rather than type it, which also makes the queries longer and more conversational.

3. Romanised Hinglish. ashwagandha ke fayde, pet saaf kaise kare, sugar kam karne ka tarika, periods late kyun hote hain.

Who: this is the big one, and the one most brands have no content for. People who think in Hindi but type in the Latin alphabet, because the English keyboard is the default, because switching to a Devanagari keyboard is friction, and because this is simply how a very large number of Indians write to each other in chat.

The behaviour is already proven by every WhatsApp, Instagram comment and YouTube comment thread in the country. People do not write Devanagari in those places; they write Hinglish. They search the same way.

Why most brands cover only the smallest slice

Four reasons, and they are structural rather than foolish.

Keyword tools underreport non-English demand. Volume data for Hinglish queries is thin and often shows near-zero where real demand exists, because the same intent is split across many spellings. A brand that plans content from tool volumes alone will conclude the demand is not there.

The spelling fragmentation is genuine. fayde, faide, fayday; kaise, kese, kaisay. One intent, a dozen spellings, each with a small individual number. The aggregate is large; no single row in the tool shows it.

Agencies write what they can write. Most SEO agencies staff English writers. Genuine Hindi and Hinglish writing is a different skill, and translated English reads wrong immediately.

Founders read English. They search in English, so they assume their customer does.

The result is that a crowded English field gets more crowded while two large fields stay comparatively open.

What people actually search by language

This is the part that matters for an editorial plan, because the intent differs by language, not just the words.

English queries skew towards:

• Comparison, X vs Y, which is better
• Evidence, does ashwagandha work, is it safe
• Ingredient research, curcumin bioavailability
• Dosage and timing
• Everything B2B, private label supplement manufacturer India, FSSAI licence for nutraceutical

Hindi and Hinglish queries skew towards:

• Symptoms, पेट में गैस के लक्षण, thyroid ke lakshan
• Home remedies, gharelu upay, देसी इलाज
• “How to”, kaise badhaye, kaise kam kare, kya khaye
• Causes, kyun hota hai
• What to eat and avoid, kya khaye kya na khaye
• Direct, specific worries, periods late kyun hote hain, ghutno me dard ka ilaj

The strategic implication is the real finding here: these are different articles, not translations.

An English reader asking “does ashwagandha work for stress?” wants evidence, trial quality and caveats. A Hinglish reader asking neend na aane ka ilaj wants to know what to do tonight. Translating the first into Hinglish serves nobody, it answers a question that reader did not ask, in a register they did not use.

That is why our editorial plan assigns language per article based on how the query is actually searched, rather than writing everything in English and translating. Roughly: evidence, comparison and B2B topics in English; symptoms, remedies and everyday worries in Hindi or Hinglish, depending on which register that specific query lives in.

Why Hinglish is harder to write than it looks

Having written a lot of it, the difficulties are specific.

There is no standard spelling. You have to choose, and your choice determines which spellings you can rank for. Our approach: pick the most common spelling for the primary query, and let natural variants appear in the body where they read naturally. Do not stuff variants, it reads badly, and badly-written Hinglish fails faster than English does because the reader notices immediately.

Register is easy to get wrong. Real Hinglish is not Hindi words in Latin script. It is a genuine mixed register with its own conventions: sugar not madhumeh, tension not chinta, doctor not chikitsak. The English words that stay English are not random, and getting them wrong makes the text read as a translation.

Which is exactly what you must avoid, because Indian readers detect translated content instantly. It reads as a brand that does not actually speak to them.

It needs native review. Not translation review, register review. Does this sound like how a person actually writes? That is a different question from whether it is accurate, and we treat it as a separate editorial step.

Technical terms need care. Some are better in English even in a Hindi article, vitamin D, thyroid, LFT. Forcing Sanskrit-derived equivalents makes the article less useful to the person who will see those words on their lab report.

The practical architecture

If you are building this, the decisions that matter:

One article per language per intent, not translations. A Hindi article and an English article on the same topic should be genuinely different pieces, because they answer different questions.

Declare the language properly. lang="hi-IN" on Hindi pages, lang="en-IN" on English. Hinglish is Latin-script Hindi-English code-mixing; we mark it en-IN because the script and much of the vocabulary are English, while the content is written for the Hindi-thinking reader.

Do not use hreflang between them unless the pages are genuine equivalents of the same content. If the articles differ in substance, they are separate pages, not alternates, and declaring them as alternates misrepresents them.

Cross-link between languages where the topics are genuinely related. A reader who lands on the Hindi symptoms article may want the English evidence piece, and the link should say what it is rather than being an invisible flag.

Separate your sitemaps or at least annotate them, so you can see indexation by language.

Load Devanagari fonts properly. Noto Sans Devanagari or similar, with the right subset and font-display behaviour. Hindi text in a fallback font looks broken and readers leave.

Check your URL policy. Transliterated-Latin slugs are more practical than Devanagari slugs, they survive copy-paste, messaging apps and analytics tools without percent-encoding noise.

Watch voice search. Hindi voice queries are longer and conversational. Articles that answer a question in a sentence near the top do better for these.

How to find the queries when the tools are thin

Since keyword volume underreports this demand, go where the language actually lives:

• YouTube search suggestions in Hindi and Hinglish. YouTube is where a huge share of Indian health information-seeking happens, and its autocomplete is an excellent demand signal.
• Google autocomplete and “People also ask”, with your browser set to Hindi.
• Your own site search logs, which show what people type in your words.
• WhatsApp and Instagram comment threads on health content, unmediated evidence of how people phrase things.
• Your customer care calls. Write down the actual phrases customers use. This is the highest-quality source available and almost nobody mines it.
• Quora and Reddit in Hindi and Hinglish.

And accept that the tool volume will look small. Judge aggregate demand from behaviour, not from a single row.

The commercial case

Two numbers to weigh.

Competition. The English field for ashwagandha benefits is contested by large publishers with large budgets. The Hinglish field for ashwagandha ke fayde is contested by rather fewer, and mostly by content that is not very good.

Conversion. A reader who finds an article in the register they think in trusts the brand more. This is not a measurable SEO factor; it is a plain commercial one.

The cost. Genuine Hindi and Hinglish writing costs more than English per article, because the writer pool is smaller and the review step is real. It is still cheaper than competing for English head terms.

The mistakes worth naming

Machine translation. Obvious to a reader within a sentence, and it damages brand perception more than having no Hindi content at all.

Writing Hindi as formal, Sanskritised prose. Nobody searches that way. मधुमेह has its place; the person searching is typing sugar.

Keyword-stuffing spelling variants. Unreadable, and readability matters more in a mixed register.

Assuming Hindi covers all of non-English India. It does not. Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujarati all have substantial search demand and the same under-served dynamic. We are starting with Hindi and Hinglish because that is where our market is concentrated and where we can maintain quality, but the opportunity extends well past it, and treating “Indian languages” as “Hindi” is its own blind spot.

Letting the compliance line slip in translation. This one has teeth. An English article that carefully says “traditional use” can become a translated Hindi article that effectively claims treatment, because the translator was not thinking about the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act. Every language needs the same claims review, independently. We treat this as non-negotiable, and it is the reason our Hindi and Hinglish articles carry their own review step rather than inheriting the English one.

The short version

Indian supplement search splits three ways, English, Devanagari Hindi, and romanised Hinglish, and most brands publish only the first, which is also the most contested.

The intent differs by language, so these are different articles rather than translations: English skews to evidence, comparison and B2B; Hindi and Hinglish skew to symptoms, home remedies, causes and what to eat.

Keyword tools underreport Hinglish because spelling fragments the volume, so find the queries in YouTube autocomplete, your site search and your customer care calls instead. Write it natively, have a native speaker review the register rather than the translation, and run claims review separately in every language.

More on the compliance side: supplement label compliance in India.