The pattern we keep seeing
A brand launches an Arabic version of its site, waits three months, and finds the Arabic pages sitting on page three while the English ones do fine. The content is the same. The domain is the same. So what's different?
We've audited a little over 60 bilingual sites in the Gulf since 2024, and the answer is almost always one of three things. Often it's all three.
1. The titles were machine-translated
Title tags and H1s get run through a translation plugin and nobody reads them again. The result is grammatically fine Arabic that no one would ever type. A clinic's "Teeth Whitening Services" turns into a formal phrase that reads like a government notice, while people in Dubai search for something much shorter, often with an English word mixed in.
The fix: have a native writer rewrite every title and H1 by hand. It's a day of work for most sites, and it's usually the single biggest win.
2. Hreflang is missing or broken
Without hreflang, Google has to guess which version to show. It often guesses English, even for someone searching in Arabic, because the English page has more links pointing at it. When hreflang is there, we regularly find it pointing at URLs that redirect or return a 404, which is about as useful as having none.
The fix: every page should list itself and its counterpart, with ar-AE (or ar-SA, and so on) and en codes, plus an x-default. Then crawl the site and check that each tag points at a live page that points back.
3. The keywords came from a spreadsheet, not from people
Plenty of Arabic keyword lists are straight translations of the English list. But Gulf searchers don't search the way a dictionary suggests. Some write Arabic in Latin letters. Some switch to English for product names. Some use Gulf words that never appear in Modern Standard Arabic.
The fix: pull the real queries for your Arabic pages from Search Console, type your main topics into Google with an Arabic keyboard and note the autocomplete, and ask the sales team what customers say on the phone. Then rewrite the pages around those words.
What happens after you fix them
On the last five sites where we did all three, Arabic organic clicks rose between 40% and 180% within four months. The biggest jumps came on sites where hreflang had been broken, because Google had been showing the wrong language to half the audience.
None of this needs a bigger budget. It needs someone who speaks the language to read the pages before they go live.
- Multilingual SEO
- Arabic SEO
- Hreflang
Mariam Al Zarooni
Mariam leads Arabic content at AdAscend and edits everything we publish in Arabic. She grew up in Sharjah and has written for Gulf brands in retail, health and government.
