Arabic & MENA SEO
How Google handles Arabic: word forms, spelling variants, dialects, right-to-left pages and sites that run in both Arabic and English.
Latest articles
Why translated sites underperform in Arabic search
What breaks when a brand translates its site into Arabic, how to localise from keywords instead, and the pages that should exist only in…
One Arabic site, two very different audiences
Where Cairo and Riyadh search for the same thing with different words, how their searches differ, and when one Arabic site should split into…
Arabic SEO, starting from how Google reads the language
How Google handles Arabic word forms, spelling variants, dialect and right-to-left layout, and the decisions that follow for your site.
Why Arabic keyword volumes always come out too low
Spelling variants, the definite article, Franco-Arabic and dialect split one Arabic keyword into many rows. A five-step way to merge them.
Choosing URL slugs for an Arabic site
Percent-encoding, link sharing, clicks and backlink anchors: how to choose a slug style for an Arabic site, by type of site.
Arabic search works differently
Arabic gives Google problems that English doesn't. One word can be spelled several ways, prefixes and suffixes change its form, Egyptians and Saudis often search for the same thing in different words, and keyword tools under-count Arabic searches. A site that simply translates its English pages usually misses most of this.
Start with the Arabic SEO guide, which explains how Google reads the language and what follows for your site. The other articles go deeper into single decisions: how to choose URL slugs, why Arabic keyword volumes come out too low, how to serve Egyptian and Gulf audiences from one site, and why translated pages rank worse than pages written in Arabic from the start.
I write in Arabic and English myself and work with clients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. If you want help with your own site, see the Arabic SEO service.
Your next move.
Tell me where things are now and where you want them to be. I reply within one business day, in Arabic or English. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll say so.