Most Egyptian companies with an Arabic version of their website built it the same way. They exported the English copy, sent it to a translator, pasted it back, and flipped the layout. The pages exist, they are indexed, and they rank for nothing. Translation solves a language problem. Search is a demand problem, and demand in Arabic is shaped differently.
People do not search in the words you write in
Written Arabic on a corporate site is formal. Search queries are not. Egyptian customers type the dialect, they drop the definite article, they leave out diacritics entirely, and a large share of younger users type Franco, the Latin script transliteration. A page optimized for the formal term can miss the phrase that carries most of the volume, and the tools will not warn you because they report each spelling variant separately.
Then there is orthography. The same word appears with and without hamza on the alef, ending in taa marbuta or a plain haa, ending in yaa or alef maqsura. Google handles a lot of this, but not perfectly, and rank tracking certainly does not. Before you decide a term is too small to bother with, collapse the variants and add the numbers up. We routinely find head terms hiding inside four low volume rows.
The technical layer people skip
Right to left is not a stylesheet toggle. Direction has to be declared on the document, mixed content needs handling so English brand names and numerals sit correctly inside Arabic sentences, and forms, breadcrumbs, sliders and progress indicators all need mirroring or they read backwards to a native speaker. Every Arabic site we audit has at least one component that was never mirrored, usually the checkout.
Language targeting matters as much. If you serve Egypt and the Gulf, the pages should be distinguishable, because Egyptian and Saudi buyers use different words for the same products and often expect different pricing and delivery information. Declare the alternate versions properly, keep the language attribute on the html element correct, and never let a single URL serve two languages depending on a cookie. Arabic slugs work perfectly well in modern browsers, though they percent encode in analytics, so pick one convention and stay with it.
Where the Arabic SEO opportunity actually is
Arabic results pages are frequently less contested than their English equivalents for the same commercial intent, because so many local competitors also published a translated site and stopped. In several categories we work in, the Arabic version of a term costs a fraction of the effort to win. That is a real advantage and it does not last forever.
The catch is that winning it needs Arabic content written by someone who thinks in Arabic. Not translated, written. The argument that persuades a Cairo buyer is usually not a rearranged version of the argument that persuades a London buyer, the objections are different, and the trust signals are different too. Payment on delivery, a phone number that answers, and a physical address do far more work in Arabic copy than any adjective.
Finally, decide which language owns which page and commit to it. Trying to rank the same URL for both is how sites end up ranking for neither. Getting that structure right at the start, rather than after two years of drift, is one of the highest value things our SEO services do for bilingual brands in this region.
