What are the opportunities for increasing conversion by enhancing your Arabic SEO strategy?
That’s the most problematic questions now on the web. Everyone in the digital marketing field could have a different answer for this and even very unique predictions. I wouldn’t agree or disagree with people who consider the golden times of SEO will come to an end “very soon”. The debates would go on for awhile with every new strict update comes from Google. Yet, this buzz is mainly considering the English search results.
What about the Arabic SEO in specific?
I strongly believe that the Arabic SEO will live for a long time and I have my reasons for that. I can think of a lot of solid factors that will let you believe me, but I will in this post cut it short for you, right to the heart of the matter.
In the middle east online markets, Arabic SEO is still one of biggest survivor and certainly a winner. Yes, and it is even more effective than other digital marketing activities such as social media. I know that you might be following the trending fashions and putting several efforts on social media activities like the rest of competitors and might find SEO is an old fashion technic, but let me ask you this: How is your conversion rate doing? How much-converted clients do you get from Arabic social media?
We are not comparing Arabic social media marketing vs SEO here, but we are starting with the right question to get things sorted out.
The Arabic SEO conversion rate
The conversion rate is the main objective of all digital marketing activities. Increasing the conversion rate and creating opportunities are the real targets for all what you are doing online. Over the years most of the companies in Dubai, KSA, Egypt and other middle east markets would come to me asking for social media marketing and they insist on that considering it as the new fashion. They are stuffed with romantic ideas and successful social media cases they heard of. I always try hard to explain to them that every company, field, and market is a special case when you come to online marketing and I always put the conversion as the top priority of doing things right. If you want the Facebook page that’s fine for branding but might not work for bringing new clients especially when you are a B2B company. Let’s give an example:
If you work in field like export/import or constructions, do you think that you will be able to get potential clients via social media channels? Well, let me suggest email marketing instead or to be more effective let’s focus on “Search”.. Yes, the SEO!
What do you think if we focus on your main keywords and services you offer? think of how much opportunities you can get from having a good rank on the results page? That’s what we are talking about!
Now, what about other fields that are focusing on B2C? Yes, social media marketing is really effective but yet if you consider an optimized website for search engines this will help you among your competitors especially if we are talking about Arabic users.
The Arabic Internet market is much larger than what most of the people expect; it is experiencing rapid growth over the last few years. Recent research indicates that there are currently 82 million Arabic-speaking Internet users. Research has progressively revealed that Arabic Internet users are using Arabic keyterms to find specific and accurate results when it comes to local services. The Arabic search queries are heavily used for fields like governmental services, financial services, law firm, mobile phones and real estate classified ads.
Why is Arabic SEO highly profitable?
To cut it short, let me lead you to the secret that everyone involved into SEO knows: “The competition is not high”. This definitely creates great opportunities for anyone who wants to get on top of the rank and increase his online visibility or catch some good fishes. Let me list for you some facts about this market and why you have a highly profitable chance with this market:
- Most of the companies in the Arab region have launched their businesses via English-only websites with the assumption that Arabic-speaking customers can simply search and find services using English keywords.
- The majority of Arabic websites still not optimized for search engines which is a good chance for any website with decent SEO to gain traffic and leads.
- The quality of Arabic translated content is still poor and this certainly harm their chances with local markets and cultures. For instances, hospitality firms sometimes translate “hospitality” as “ضيافة” which is an accurate translation but not effective for search. This translated word can be related to other things in the Arabic culture and wouldn’t serve the services well.
- Majority of results are generated from forums and personal blogs. Those are mainly articles or discussions and not service providers.
- Most of the companies are investing in search engine ads (PPC) instead of organic SEO which requires a lot of money and the results can last for short time. I have been watching that for years and the mentality of the marketing teams is always about “spending the budget on fast and quick results”. Unfortunately, it was difficult to convince them something else.
The playground is yours when you really focus on building Arabic quality content and optimize it effectively for the Arabic users. Finally, Arabic SEO is very effective components of digital marketing strategies and you should always consider investing money and efforts in getting up in Google results.
