What is the purpose of this website?
This website serves as a prototype for communicating advice and collecting information on the subject of smoking cessation. We created this website as an example of how Indian health care authorities and institutions can leverage the growing level of digital literacy among their patients by utilizing online resources as a means of communicating health information. The simple structure and UX of the website is intended to demonstrate how patients might easily navigate to key topics, and the language toggle bar indicates how easily patients could choose their language of choice.
Google in India
Google is the largest search engine in the world, accounting for 83% of the global market share and processing an estimated 8.5 billion searches per day. David Feinber, Google’s Head of Health, reports that 7% of daily searches are health-related. In India, Google has a market share of 98.5%, making it by far the most popular search engine. India is the second largest digital market in the world, with 692 million Indians connected to the internet – a figure that accounts for 69.2% of India’s population in 2023. A reported 450 million of these Indians are smartphone users. As of 2023, Google.com is the most visited website in India. The percentage of internet users in India is expected to grow significantly year-on-year, with Indians in rural areas accounting for an exponential proportion of that growth.
Smoking in India
There are 267 million tobacco users in India, making it the country with the second largest number of tobacco users in the world (behind China). According to WHO, India accounts for 12% of the world’s smokers.
Access to health care information in India
Access to health care in rural India remains an enormous challenge, with many patients having to travel long distances for treatments and consultations, especially for subspecialist divisions. According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2021 statistics show that nearly two-thirds of India’s population reside in rural areas, yet only 33% of health care workers and 27% of doctors are available in rural areas. An additional complication arises from the fact that India is home to 22 major languages; languages spoken in rural areas are often different from the languages spoken by the nearest healthcare practitioners, causing an additional barrier to medical care.
How Google can help fill the gap in accessible information
These challenges place great importance on the accessibility and factual reliability of health information available through Google for the Indian market. When face-to-face consultations with health care practitioners are not available, search engines become a natural alternative source of information. However, despite Google employing far stricter guidelines on the inclusion of health-related content in its search engine, the quality of fact-checking and medical scrutiny varies between markets. Google is available in ten languages spoken across India: English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.
In many of these languages, health and medical information derives from non-authoritative sources or is lacking completely. Smoking cessation is one of such health-related topics in which availability and accuracy of information on the first search engine results pages are low-quality. The higher-quality resources accessible through Google in the Indian market are often only available in one or two of India’s several language.
A clear need for smoking cessation information online
We ascertain there is a strong and unmet demand for smoking cessation resources available in Indian languages. Due to the low competition in the Indian market, and Google’s prioritization of .edu and .gov domains for health-related search, such websites could easily claim top search results positions, providing hundreds of millions of Indians with helpful and factually accurate information on smoking cessation. For this purpose, a prototype website has been created to reflect the appearance and information contained within such a website. The prototype website intends to resemble a patient-focused resource hub of advice, tips and information on smoking cessation, with the ability to toggle between two Indian languages – English and Hindi.
How this website was made
The information on the website has been created with the help of ChatGPT, then fact-checked and amended by a medical doctor before publication. The translations into Hindi have also been conducted via AI, and the images are a mixture of stock photos and AI-generated images using Midjourney. Websites based on this prototype would benefit from localizing generic medical information toward their target audience, and ensuring all translations are quality-checked by native speakers. Websites intended as a smoking cessation resource should reflect a simple site structure and UX design to simplify navigation for patients.
A note on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
To optimise websites to appear in specific types of search results, keyword research can be conducted to uncover common search trends among a target market. Specialist tools can be utilized for an overview of the most commonly searched queries in connection with specific topics. These insights can then inform the website content and communication strategy. We performed keyword research for English-language Google searches in India, to uncover the most common search queries related to smoking cessation. We found most recurring informational searches* to focus on:
- Information on the detrimental health effects of smoking, and the health benefits of quitting.
- Tips on how to quit smoking.
- Suggestions and advice on how to support a loved one in the process of quitting tobacco.
- Information about, and advice on dealing with, the early withdrawal symptoms of tobacco cessation.
*informational search differentiates from commercial search, in which the searcher’s intent is to compare or shop smoking cessation products.
The pages and their information on this website reflect the biggest areas of search interest in the Indian market, based on English-language search queries. Search data has been determined and analyzed by using the SEO research tool Semrush.
English 
Hindi