Arabic SEO
People search differently in Arabic: other words, other spellings, other dialects. I build Arabic SEO that ranks, and keeps your Arabic and English pages from competing with each other.
Is this for you?
A good fit if
- You sell to Arabic speakers in the Gulf or Egypt
- Your Arabic pages are translations that never ranked
- Your site has Arabic and English versions and you're not sure the hreflang and URLs are right
Not the right fit if
- Your customers only search in English
- You want to publish machine translation in bulk
- You won't let native Arabic writers touch the content
How I do it.
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Arabic demand research
The Arabic searches people really type, with spelling variants and Gulf and Egyptian terms, mapped to pages.
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Site structure for two languages
URLs, hreflang and internal links set up so each language ranks on its own.
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Content written in Arabic
Pages written for Arabic readers from the start, using the words they search with.
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Tracking per language
Search Console and analytics split by language and market, so you can see what's working in each.
What you get.
- Arabic keyword map with dialect variants
- hreflang and URL review
- Arabic page briefs or rewritten pages
- Internal linking plan for both languages
- Arabic titles, descriptions and schema
- Reports split by language
The details.
The most expensive mistake I see in this region is doing keyword research in English, translating the results, and calling that an Arabic strategy.
It fails for a simple reason. Translation keeps the words and loses the intent. The English term with the search volume often turns into an Arabic phrase nobody uses, while the phrase people really type (often in dialect, often mixing Arabic and Latin letters) never shows up in the research at all.
How Arabic search is different
Dialect and formal Arabic
People in Egypt, the Gulf and the Levant search differently. Content in formal Arabic can rank and still sell poorly, because it doesn’t sound like the person reading it.
Letters and spelling
People mix Arabic and Latin letters, use diacritics and hamzas inconsistently, and often type brand names in Latin letters. Your keyword list has to cover all of it.
Less competition, more technical problems
Many Arabic search results are less competitive than their English versions. The opportunity is real, but what usually holds a site back is how it handles right-to-left layout and hreflang.
The same search means different things in different markets
The same Arabic phrase can mean “I want to buy” in Riyadh and “I want to learn” in Cairo. One page for both usually works for neither.
What the work includes
- Arabic keyword research built from search data, not translated
- Separate research by dialect and market for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
- Intent mapped per market, not just per keyword
- hreflang set up and checked
- URL structure for sites with Arabic and English versions
- Checks of right-to-left layout and rendering
- Which pages to translate and which to write from scratch
- Arabic content briefs your writers can work from
- Brand names and their spellings in Latin letters
- Google Business Profile and local listings in Arabic
How people search changes from one market to the next, so each market has its own page:SEO in Egypt, SEO in Saudi Arabia and SEO in the UAE.
Structuring a site in Arabic and English
There are three workable ways to set up an Arabic and English site, and the wrong choice is expensive to undo later.
Subfolders
/ar/ on the same domain. The best option for most businesses: both languages share the domain’s authority, maintenance is simpler and hreflang is straightforward.
Subdomains
ar.example.com. Makes sense when the two sites are run by separate teams as separate operations. It splits authority between them.
Separate domains
Rarely the right answer unless there’s a legal or brand reason. It doubles the work and splits everything.
For a service business working in all three markets, subfolders are almost always the right choice. If your site was already built another way, moving it is a real project. It’s worth doing, but plan it properly.
Why aren’t my Arabic pages indexed?
It’s usually one of three things: hreflang pointing to the wrong URLs, Arabic pages with a canonical tag pointing to the English version, or an Arabic version built in the browser so the crawler never sees the content. All three can be found in a couple of hours.
In their words.
Clients asked not to be named. Each quote links to the case study with the numbers behind it.
See the numbers (Editor, Arabic lifestyle publisher)Our monthly clicks from Google went from about 113 thousand to more than 190 thousand in three months.
See the numbers (Owner, online store, Egypt)Much more of our catalogue shows up in Google now. Impressions went up by more than a third, and clicks followed.
See the numbers (Manager, services company, Saudi Arabia)We started with almost no visits from Google. Now people find us every month when they search for our services.
Common questions.
Is Arabic SEO different from English SEO?
The basics are the same. What people search for, how they spell it, who you compete with and what content they expect are different, and translated keywords miss most of that.
Gulf or Egyptian Arabic?
It depends on who buys from you. Often it's both, and we choose the wording page by page.
Can you fix a site that already has Arabic and English versions?
Yes. Most of the work is usually hreflang, duplicate pages and thin Arabic pages.
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.