Arabic SEO is not translation: how to build a bilingual website that ranks in both languages

Many businesses in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf have a website in English with an Arabic version “added”. Usually that means the English text was run through a translation tool, or translated word for word by someone in a hurry. The pages exist, but they rarely rank, and Arabic-speaking visitors can tell straight away that the site was not written for them.

Arabic SEO works best when the Arabic site is treated as a second, equal website that shares a design and a structure with the English one, not as a translation layer on top of it.

People search differently in Arabic

The words people type in Arabic are not a translation of the English search. A business owner in Riyadh might search in Arabic using a local term, a spelling variation or a phrase that has no direct English equivalent. If your Arabic page only contains a literal translation of your English keywords, it will match searches that nobody makes.

Start with Arabic keyword research: look at the phrases people use, the questions they ask, and the words competitors’ Arabic pages rank for. Then write Arabic copy around those, in Modern Standard Arabic that reads naturally for your market.

Paired pages, not a language switch

Each English page should have one Arabic twin with its own address, for example /bilingual-websites/ and /ar/bilingual-websites/. The two pages tell Google about each other with hreflang tags, so English searchers are shown the English page and Arabic searchers are shown the Arabic one.

• Every page links to its own twin, and the twin links back.
• An x-default tag tells Google which version to show everyone else.
• The language switch in the menu goes to the matching page, not back to the Arabic home page.

Right-to-left is more than flipping the page

A good Arabic layout is designed right to left from the start. The navigation, icons, arrows, forms, numbers and even the order of cards change direction. Fonts need proper Arabic support and comfortable line spacing. Mixed content, such as an English brand name inside an Arabic sentence, must display in the right order.

When this is done properly, Arabic visitors stay longer and contact you more, and both of those signals help the page in search.

Titles, descriptions and schema in Arabic

Each Arabic page needs its own search title and description, written in Arabic around Arabic keywords. The page language must be set to Arabic (lang="ar" and dir="rtl"), and structured data such as breadcrumbs and FAQs should be in Arabic too.

If an Arabic visitor would not guess that a page was translated, Google probably will not either.

A checklist for bilingual SEO

• Arabic keyword research, separate from English.
• One Arabic page for each English page, each with its own address.
• hreflang between every pair, plus x-default.
• Arabic titles, descriptions, headings and image alt text.
• Right-to-left design tested on phones.
• Arabic forms and thank-you pages, with replies in Arabic.

We build both languages together, so the Arabic site is never an afterthought. See how we approach bilingual Arabic and English websites.