Arabic SEO — the part most agencies bolt on afterwards
Almost every agency in the region will tell you they do Arabic SEO. In practice that usually means running the English keyword list through a translator, pasting the output into a mirrored page tree, and calling it a bilingual site. It does not rank, and the reason is not effort — it is that Arabic search is a different market with different queries, not the same market in different characters.
Why translated SEO does not rank in Arabic
A translated page answers a question nobody asked. Search terms are not translations of each other: the English phrase your customers use and the Arabic phrase they use are chosen independently, by different people, with different assumptions — and the Arabic one is frequently a completely different concept rather than a rendering of the English. On top of that sits a technical layer that only breaks in Arabic: right-to-left rendering that collapses under one absolutely positioned element, hreflang declared in one direction only, a font stack with no Arabic glyphs, mixed-direction text where a Latin brand name or a phone number reverses mid-sentence. None of these show up when you test the English site, which is why they survive so long. The result is the pattern we find constantly: an Arabic tree that exists, looks fine to its owner, and is either unindexed or ranking for nothing.
What Arabic SEO actually involves
Four bodies of work, and skipping any one of them wastes the other three. All four are scored in the free audit:
- Independent Arabic keyword research — built from what Arabic speakers type, including Modern Standard Arabic, dialect variants and the Latin transliterations people mix in, rather than translated from an English list.
- The bilingual technical layer: reciprocal hreflang across every page pair, correct lang and dir attributes server-rendered, an Arabic-capable font stack, and RTL layouts that survive real content.
- Content written by people who write Arabic — Modern Standard Arabic for site copy, with the register matched to the market you are selling into, not the one you happen to sit in.
- AI visibility in Arabic, which is the newest and least contested of the four: assistants answering Arabic questions have a small pool of credible Arabic sources to draw on, and being in it is cheaper today than it will ever be again.
What we do
- Audit your Arabic tree as its own site, with its own score — a strong English site routinely hides a broken Arabic one.
- Fix the bilingual plumbing ourselves: hreflang, canonicals, lang and dir, fonts, and the RTL bugs that only appear under real Arabic content.
- Rebuild the Arabic keyword map from scratch and restructure pages around what it finds, rather than around the English site's shape.
- Write or rewrite Arabic pages so they read as authored — including the FAQ and answer blocks that win featured snippets and AI citations in Arabic.
- Re-score monthly against the same 23 checks, with the Arabic tree tracked separately from the English one.
Common questions
Straight answers, including the awkward ones.
How is this different from translating our English site?
Translation starts from your English pages and asks what they say in Arabic. We start from Arabic search demand and ask what pages should exist. The two produce different site structures more often than not — some English pages have no Arabic equivalent worth building, and some Arabic queries need a page the English site never had.
Can you audit an Arabic site right now?
Yes, and it costs nothing. Point the free audit at your Arabic URL and you get a score for that tree specifically — the same 23 checks, including whether it is indexed, whether hreflang is reciprocal, and whether an AI crawler can reach it. The report is yours whether or not you talk to us.
Our site is English-only. Should we build an Arabic version?
Only if the search volume justifies it, and we will tell you honestly when it does not — some GCC B2B niches genuinely run in English. What we will not do is recommend an Arabic tree by default, because a half-built one is worse than none: it splits your authority and puts a page you are not maintaining in front of your customers.
Who writes the Arabic?
People who write Arabic natively, working from the keyword research rather than from an English draft. Machine translation is the single most common reason the Arabic pages we audit read badly, and readers notice long before search engines do.
Score your Arabic site in under a minute
Run the free 23-point audit on your Arabic URL. No card, no account, and the report is yours to keep.