Arabic SEO

Understanding Middle Eastern Culture

It is just like any other aspect of marketing, studying your target market.

To better customize your product or service to your Arab customers and apply Arabic SEO techniques to reach them, you must make sure that you understand their culture and behavior, and preferences before you finalize your decisions.

Once you study the demographic and geographic area of your customers, you can develop a targeted marketing campaign that will give you a good Return on investment.

This is where our role emerges. You have done your research and finalized your product and niche, and we will translate your vision into a well-optimized website targeted at your customers and compatible with Google Arabic algorithms to rank you higher.

Arab Consumer Behaviour

Arab customers must be handled differently than customers in the United Kingdom.

They possess the following characteristics.

However, it should be noted that these characteristics cannot be generalized to each and every Arab customer, but it is simply aimed to give companies a general understanding of how Arab customers behave.

• Brand Conscious: Due to many fake brands and low-quality products in the Middle East which are less common in the UK, Arabs have developed awareness to differentiate between quality and low-quality products and services.
• Special Buying Behaviour: This means that Arabs take buying products very seriously; they prefer to get a recommendation from a friend that has tried a certain product or buy from a local store next to their house, someone they had known a long time ago.
• Status is Important: Arabs do not care much if the product is practical for them; they need a product that reflects their status or even look like a higher-class individual.
• Online Purchasing Is Not Very Popular: Most Arabs like to touch before they buy. They don’t trust online shops. You can help ease their doubts by providing videos showing the product and detailed images and an Arabic customer support agent. Make sure they have the Cash On Delivery option.
• Fashion Trends: Whenever there is a new fashion trend, Arabs are likely to be the first ones to adopt it. So, you must keep up with the latest trends.
• Religion: Arabs are mostly Muslims, and religious people, and you are expected to honor that and respect them.
• Bargaining: They feel a sense of pride if they negotiate to get a better deal. Sometimes it is not to actually get a good deal, but to feel that sense of achievement, so try to give them a slight discount or a freebie.
• Age: The majority of the Arab population is young (Under 30 years).
• Arabic: You can go miles by speaking Arabic with them or employing Native Arab speakers.

Challenges of Doing Arabic SEO Services in the Middle East

As mentioned before, Arabic SEO techniques are a little different from those techniques used for English.

Any Arabic SEO Company will face the following challenges:

Unnatural Tactics

Most Arabic SEO Companies use Blackhat SEO techniques to help customers rank. Even though this might work for a while, Search Engines will eventually notice these unnatural practices and penalize your customer’s website by either downranking them or even getting them deindexed. Such black hat practices include purchasing links, automated links, keyword stuffing, and copying content from other websites.

Spammy Content

Many of the Arabic Websites out there have spammy content. The website pages are poorly written and designed. Due to that, Arab users are becoming more and more selective about what they read and what websites they access. Therefore, this tactic has become obsolete.

Tracking Issues

SEO Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and others sometimes show results different than what is happening on the ground. For this reason, we advise that you have someone in that specific country you are targeting to assess your site’s rank.

ِSearch Behaviour

When Arabs search online in their native tongue, it can be very confusing for companies to understand their intent. In the example above, the search is for the online casino Betfinal. It is written in Arabic as ”بيت فاينل”. It can even be written differently. It all depends on how each person thinks it will be written in Arabic.

Some companies use Google Translate to get the Arabic version of the keyword; while that may work sometimes, it often gives a completely irrelevant query.

Arabic URLs

Many online marketing tools cannot track Arabic URLs because of the foreign characters.

It will often appear like this:

However, Google Analytics can track them.

But, our advice, to be safe, is to use URLs in English.

Video SEO

Arabs are the top region that uses YouTube. With that said, you need to apply Arabic SEO for your videos. How do you do that? Simply, post your videos on YouTube, in Arabic; this way, when they search in Arabic, your video will be indexed on Google and appear on top.

Our Arabic SEO Process for UK-based Companies

Optimizing Content

Content structure is the most important on-site SEO ranking factor.

We make sure to thoroughly abide by each one of them.

Let’s take a look at what SEO-friendly content structure consists of.

Content uniqueness: Content must be unique with minimal plagiarism. It should also be informative and engaging.
Content length: Content must be at least 1,500 words long.
Breadcrumbs: They are like a second menu that helps you know where you are navigating. They really make the website more user-friendly and give them clearer accessibility.

Table of contents: When a page has a table of contents, it helps the reader break it down and navigate through it.
Visuals: Videos and pictures are a must-have on your page. They make the content more lively and more engaging as well as more informative. Just make sure you do not randomly stuff those pictures or videos.
Heading hierarchy: The page must be well structured, meaning it must have headers. The page title is called H1. Other Headers are H2 and could go on till H6. The important thing to know is that each sub-header emphasizes the main header.

Keyword density: Your Keyword must consist of 2.5% of your page content. No more, no less. If your keywords do not appear much in the content, they will not be considered important. On the other hand, if they recur too much, it would look spammy.
Outbound Link Quality: You must link to external sources on each page. However, these pages must have a good domain rating. If you link to an untrustworthy website, then yours will lose its credibility.
Bullets and Numbered Lists: Lists also make the content more reader-friendly. When the reader finds your content clear and easy to navigate, so will search engines.

More SEO Factors To Look Out For

Site Performance

Arabic SEO Title

Your target keyword must be in the Arabic SEO title. This informs both Google and the person doing the search that your page is about what they were looking for.

Also, searchers are much more likely to click on a web page if the title contains the exact keyword or phrase they just typed.

Meta Description

A meta description is a snippet that appears right under your SEO title in the search results page (as seen below).

It should include your focus keyword and must be short and engaging and not misleading, but engaging.

Broken Links

You have heard about the ”Error 404”. It means that the page you clicked could be found. This is what we call a broken link. This can seriously affect your site’s SEO health. Luckily, some tools are available to identify broken links.

Image optimization

Each page must have images. However, for these images to be SEO-compatible. They must:

Be unique and not stolen; you can use stock image sites for that or design your own.

An image must have an alt text, a description, and a caption to describe it and help search engines better understand what it is and its purpose.

The size of an image must not exceed 100 Kb, otherwise, your website will lag, and it will lower performance results.

Site Structure

Just like the header hierarchy, the website’s structure must be chronological and make sense.

If your website is about food recipes. Then you should have separate pages for healthy food, vegan, desserts…etc. Each page must have subpages that elaborate on the main page.

Domain Rank

It is a search engine ranking score that determines how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages

As your website grows and ages and more SEO practices you apply. Your domain rank will increase. The higher your domain rank, the more trustworthy your website is.

Mobile Arabic SEO

Links

Because you are targeting Arab regions and using Arabic SEO, there are certain things concerning links that must not go without mentioning.

Very few Arabic websites link to other websites these days. They simply do not trust them due to lack of copyright enforcement laws in the region.

An Arabic SEO company must not forget that getting backlinks from decent English websites will also have a positive impact on the Arabic pages as well.

With that said, here are some factors you should take into consideration:

• Hosting: Good hosting in the Middle Eastern region is quite rare this is why most websites prefer to host their websites in the United Kingdom or other parts of Europe.
• Arabic URLs: Even though Arabic URLs are not highly advised, if you do use them, bear in mind that they might cause some problems with content management systems, and not all tools can track them. Also, make sure to keep them short.
• ccTLDs: If you want to target a specific country, UAE, for example, it is a good idea to buy a domain that has .ae. www.companyname.ae. This will help you reach more customers in that country.

The Importance of Google Featured Snippets

You will probably notice, just like in the image below, that sometimes Google features a segment of your website and puts it on the top of the search results page.

In order to achieve that, you must have rich snippets lists or short definitions that exactly answer or reflect the search query.

In the example below, We searched for Football Games Today, and Google automatically featured a website that lists the football games today.

This is because this feature answers the exact query.

Advantages of Arabic SEO

Arabic SEO has advantages that you will not find in English SEO.

Let’s take a look at what they are:

• Lower Competition: In many industries, even nowadays, there is not much competition among websites in Arabic. This gives new entrants a big chance to compete, especially if they use the right SEO tactics.
• Machine Translation: Many Arabic SEO agencies do not have native Arabic speakers and often use machine translation to have an Arabic version f their website, without properly optimizing it. This also narrows down the competition if you have native speakers.
• Conversions: If you want to generate leads through Arabic SEO, it is not difficult as keywords are easy to find and can get you good conversion rates with little investment.
• Ecommerce: Creating an Ecommerce page for your company is easy as Ecommerce Arabic Keywords are relatively easy to find and with little competition. The hard part relies on logistics. Online Marketing is the easy part.
• Short-term Focus: An Arabic SEO Agency that practices black hat tactics is untrustworthy. While such tactics will give you short-term success, in the long run, search engines will punish you by lowering your rank or deindexing you.
• PPC Ads: Many Arabs believe that the advertisement they see on websites is a scam. This is why organic traffic is more effective on Arabic Websites.

Arabic Regions To Venture

Below are the three main Arabic regions you must invest in through Arabic SEO.

Among those three, Gulf countries should definitely be your top priority as they have the most spending power, due to their wealth.