Most bilingual websites in Saudi Arabia are built the same way: the English site comes first, then someone translates it into Arabic. The pages look complete, both language switches work, and yet the Arabic version barely appears in Google. The reason is simple. People do not search in translated sentences. They search the way they speak.
The same need, different words
An English page might target “dental clinic in Khobar”. A literal translation gives you a formal Arabic phrase that very few people type. Real searches mix dialect, spelling variations and English loan words: some users write the clinic type in formal Arabic, others use the colloquial word, and many type the English brand name in Arabic letters. Each of these variations can have a different search volume and a different set of competing pages.
Spelling matters more than most teams expect. Arabic searchers swap hamza forms, use “ه” and “ة” interchangeably at the end of words, and drop diacritics entirely. Google handles some of this, but not all of it, and the pages that rank tend to match the most common spelling.
How to research Arabic keywords properly
- Start from the customer, not the English list. Write down how a customer would describe the problem out loud, in Arabic, before opening any tool.
- Collect variations. Formal and dialect wording, common misspellings, and Arabized English terms such as “ماركتنق” or “سيو”.
- Check real search data. Use Google Keyword Planner with the language set to Arabic and the location set to Saudi Arabia, and look at Google’s own suggestions and “People also ask” results in Arabic.
- Look at who already ranks. If the first page is full of forums and directories, there is room for a well-structured service page.
Build the site for two languages, not one and a copy
Technical setup decides whether both versions can rank at all. Each language needs its own URL, correct hreflang tags pointing the versions at each other, Arabic titles and meta descriptions written for search rather than translated, and right-to-left layouts that do not break on mobile. When these are missing, Google often treats the Arabic pages as duplicates of the English ones.
What this means for your business
If your Arabic pages get little organic traffic, the content is usually not the only problem. The keywords were never researched in Arabic to begin with. Fixing that is one of the highest-return SEO tasks for a Saudi business, because many competitors have made the same mistake.
