Arabic SEO is the practice of getting Arabic-language pages found in search, and it is not English SEO with the text swapped out. The script runs right to left, one word can be spelled several ways, and the language people speak differs from the language they write. This article is for business owners and marketing managers who serve Arabic-speaking customers and want their Arabic pages to pull their weight, and for the developers who build them.
Why do Arabic keywords have so many spellings?
The first thing an English-speaking marketer notices in Arabic keyword data is that the same word appears many times with slightly different spelling, and that the volume is split across them. This is not messy data; it is the language.
- Diacritics. Short vowels are usually omitted in everyday writing, so most searches have none, but a page that includes them for clarity may not match the query as expected.
- Hamza and alef. The alef at the start of a word is written with or without a hamza depending on the writer, and search engines only partially normalise the difference.
- Taa marbuta and haa, ya and alef maqsura. Final letters that sound alike are routinely swapped in casual typing.
- Attached prefixes. The conjunction "and", the definite article and prepositions attach to the following word, so a keyword and its prefixed forms are counted separately.
- Loanwords and brands. Foreign product names are transliterated several ways, and many people type them in Latin letters inside an Arabic sentence.
The practical response is to pick one standard spelling for your own copy, use it consistently in titles and headings, and let the body text mention the common variants naturally where they would appear in real writing. Do not stuff a page with every spelling; search engines treat that the way you would expect.
Do people search in dialect or in Modern Standard Arabic?
Both, and the split depends on what they are looking for. Formal and commercial searches (a service, a company, a regulation, a product category) lean towards Modern Standard Arabic, which is what your pages should be written in. Conversational searches, questions and anything typed on a phone lean towards dialect, and dialect varies by region.
For a business site the rule is to write the page in clear, plain MSA, so it reads as credible to every Arabic reader, and to let question-style headings and FAQ sections carry the everyday phrasing your customers actually use. Keyword research has to be done in Arabic, by someone who reads it; translating an English keyword list and checking the volumes tells you almost nothing.
Should the Arabic site live at /ar/, on a subdomain or on its own domain?
For most businesses the answer is a language prefix in the path, such as an /ar/ section on the same domain. It keeps the authority of the domain in one place, it is the easiest structure to generate correctly from a single codebase, and it makes hreflang straightforward: every English page declares its Arabic partner, every Arabic page declares its English partner, and an x-default points at whichever should greet a searcher of unknown language.
Separate domains make sense only when the Arabic business is genuinely separate, with its own audience, content and team.
Two details matter more than the choice itself. The Arabic page must exist for every hreflang tag that points at it, and the language must be chosen by the URL rather than by browser settings or a cookie, because a crawler carries neither. Arabic slugs are fine; transliterated Latin slugs are also fine. What hurts is mixing the two or changing them after launch.
How do you write Arabic titles and meta descriptions?
Arabic text is wider on the screen than its English equivalent and wraps differently in a search result, so the length limits that work for English are a rough guide only. Write the title so that the important words come first, because the tail is what gets truncated. Keep a Latin brand name at the end, separated clearly, and check how a mixed-direction title actually renders.
Meta descriptions should be written as an answer to the query, in MSA, with the main keyword in its standard spelling near the beginning. Avoid descriptions that are simply the English one translated; they tend to be longer, stiffer and not phrased the way anyone searches.
Why do translated pages underperform?
Because translation preserves the argument but not the search behaviour behind it. An English page is built around English queries, English competitors and English ways of asking. Run it through a translator and the Arabic page inherits keywords nobody types, headings nobody searches for and idioms that read as foreign. It is technically indexed and practically invisible.
The pages that work are written in Arabic for the Arabic reader: same facts, same offer, same structure, but with their own keyword research, their own headings and their own natural phrasing. That is why we treat English and Arabic as two first-class versions of every screen rather than an original and a copy, and why the Arabic version is planned in the discovery workshop rather than added at the end.