Doing SEO in Arabic is still the most cost-effective way to acquire organic traffic in the Middle East. Building long-term organic reach is a cornerstone of every marketing plan, which is why SEO in Arabic will continue to be the primary means of digital lead acquisition in the Middle East.

There are an estimated 199 million Internet users in the Arabic region, and it can be presumed that they frequently seek nearby local services and products. And while we see a lot of rivalry on regional keywords in English website optimization, SEO in Arabic is still relatively young.

In recent years, digital marketing investments in the region have been mostly focused on social media organic traffic, with SEO being overlooked. However, the pandemic has brought us back to the point where we need to reconsider search engine strategy when chasing organic leads.

In this post, we’ll discuss the best techniques for doing SEO in Arabic and how to increase organic traffic to your upper funnel.

Do lots of research

Companies who gloss over the connection between culture and religion, according to a Harvard Business Review study, neglect a vital aspect of success in the Middle East area. The Arab typical consumer has distinct search habits, which are largely differentiated from what Westerners are used to on the bases of culture and religious norms.

Optimize your website for the target audience, taking into account local customs and, more crucially, the cultural implications of your marketing efforts.

You also need to understand relevant marketing messaging, terminology, and trends, as well as how the language you’re employing has been translated for an SEO in Arabic.

Of course, you would need to do a fair bit of research too. Divide the region into divisions and choose the top market for which you will need to optimize. If your main market is the UAE, you’ll need to optimize your content and keywords to match the locals’ most relevant terms.

You may also wish to conduct a detailed study on the market’s leading rivals, analyzing their current keyword rankings, domain authority, backlinks, and degree of competition. To discover content gaps for the best strategy, understand the landscape before doing SEO in Arabic.

Keep native Arabic keywords in mind

Extracting the top relevant terms based on monthly volume is insufficient for an SEO in Arabic. You must first understand that competition is low for keywords specific to the Middle East.

Begin by undertaking extensive research to identify the most relevant keywords.

Make a list of phrases that your offline clients, sales teams, and customer service representatives use and include it in your final list. Filter your final list thoroughly and break it into categories as needed.

Also, avoid directly translating keywords. To prevent targeting ineffective phrases, localize the keywords. Typically, businesses translate keywords from English to Arabic and lose a significant proportion of relevant traffic.

In Arabic culture, the word “hospitality” would be translated as “generosity,” which is completely inaccurate. Some words’ translations are occasionally transcribed in Arabic rather than directly translated.

Publish Arabic content

This next tip couldn’t be more obvious.

By far, when done well, running Arabic content will bring more traffic than any other ranking criteria for doing SEO in Arabic. 

Why? As previously stated in this post, competition in the Middle East for many keywords is extremely low, thus simply having SEO content in Arabic on your website will likely result in ranking for longtail keyword search queries.

We’ve seen websites with less than five connections to the page and a lot of Arabic content rank in the top places for many keywords in an industry.

Because many sectors have few competitors optimizing for Arabic keywords, you may rank for a variety of things if you simply publish a lot of content about issues in that area.

Optimize your content

Use a competent native SEO copywriter to produce native SEO in Arabic and meta descriptions instead of translating your MetaData.

Don’t keep to the English SEO structure and properly incorporate your localized keywords into your Meta Tags and HTML text. Optimize all of your material to include Arabic alt descriptions so that you may rank first in Google Images and Videos.

If you run an eCommerce store, it’s critical to localize your product-related information, such as the shopping cart, product description, photos, and videos, utilizing keywords for SEO in Arabic.

Make sure your multilingual website has the appropriate language tags. Although it is not technically necessary to translate URLs into Arabic, it is critical to avoid duplicate content. To avoid any redirections to English material, make sure to examine your website for broken links.

Local domains are also important for ranking higher in local SERPs. To get the most out of local search in the Arabic region, use a local domain name for your Arabic site.

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Don’t forget link building

As with any SEO effort, link building is crucial, and doing SEO in Arabic is no different. 

Obtaining regional links with Arabic anchor texts from Middle Eastern countries might be profitable and well worth the effort. However, these days, considerably fewer Arabic websites will even contemplate linking to other websites.

Many websites would steal content illegally from another website rather than linking to it as a reference due to a lack of enforcement of copyright laws in the region. Despite the hurdles, there are certain strategies to help us get additional links from the region.

When seeking to acquire links to increase the rankings of the Arabic section of their website, one error businesses commonly make is forgetting that links from other areas and English websites would still benefit the Arabic section of the website if it is on the same domain as the English section.

Many websites have achieved top rankings in Arabic despite having few or no Arabic connections simply because they had a high backlink profile in English.

The bottom line

It will pay you to shift your focus to building a good strategy for doing SEO in Arabic.

Pursuing SEO in Arabic is the key to your company’s organic growth in the region being stronger and longer lasting. In reality, it will be more cost-effective for your digital marketing budget to begin with.

Consider hiring an SEO company in the country where you want to localize your business and taking full advantage of the fact that competition is low due to misconception, so those who get in now and invest little will end up gaining a lot. If you wish to know more about how you can do SEO in Arabic and boost your local business, feel free to drop us a message at Igloo today!