Google is going all out to assert its search dominance in India. To increase the strong foothold the tech giant already has in the country, they have come up with many new India specific innovations.
One of the fundamentals of such India-specific innovations is Google Voice Search & Assistant. We take a good look at how does SEO work on Google.
To understand, how the increase in aggressive pushing by Google for voice based-applications will impact SEO in India. Therefore also understanding how to craft successful digital marketing campaigns with a new SEO landscape.
Vernacular Is Key
Voice-based internet searching has had an unprecedented rise in India, according to Google – Voice searches in India has increased by 270%. Hence is it is only natural to see Google shift its search focus more-and-more on voice. India has 22 recognized vernacular languages along with the two official languages of Hindi & English.
Google is increasing its support for Indic languages in its AI-Google Assistant, by adding – Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, & Marathi. This update makes it easier for businesses to factor in vernacular content in their brand-building strategy and digital marketing campaigns.
AI-driven Algorithm Update
The impact of India can be felt across the world as Google rolls out its newest search algorithm update – BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Since 2015, this is Google’s first AI-driven core search algorithm update.
This update has been made so that Google search gets better at NLP and improves its contextual-understanding of human language. From the SEO perspective, BERT may have an impact on some business’s first page ranking & none on others.
This ambiguity makes it harder for businesses to calibrate their digital marketing campaigns while making Voice-based search results more accurate.
Increased Reach
It seems like Google is not only riding the wave of voice search in India, but also propelling it. Only last year Google partnered with the government of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to set up Google Stations across 12,000 villages. Google Station will provide rural Indians with high-quality internet, connecting them to the larger Google ecosystem.
This along with Google’s many more India specific Government-backed initiatives like – Free Public WiFi has increased the reach of Google across rural India. As more regional users flood the internet, Indian businesses must adapt their SEO marketing strategy according to the wants & desires of a more localized population and calibrate them into their overarching digital marketing campaigns.
User Usability Potential
Google this year in its annual – ‘Google For India’ event also announced a new Google Assistant-partnership with the largest telecom operator in the country VodafoneIdea. This move was done to reach the last chunk of 2G users in India, by enabling them to access Google Assitant & Search via SMS and Calling.
Another wedge to drive up usability is the push of AndriodGO devices by Google into the Indian smartphone market. As 4G data rates become cheaper and overall HDI increases, rural Indians are the biggest opportunity for Google Search.
In Conclusion
Google’s aggressive to win rural India, has put tremendous pressure on Indian businesses to recalibrate their digital marketing campaigns and has also opened up new growth opportunities.
To navigate such turbulent times in SEO & digital marketing, Indian businesses need to partner with skilled and experienced digital marketing agencies, to further their business goals.
