Arabic or English SEO: Which Should an Egyptian Business Target?

Say you run a physiotherapy clinic in Sheikh Zayed. A mother looking for help for her son's knee types "علاج طبيعي الشيخ زايد". A young professional at a multinational types "physiotherapy Sheikh Zayed". Same clinic, same service, two different searches, two different sets of results.

For most Egyptian businesses, Arabic SEO brings more volume, and English SEO brings specific buyers who are often worth more per visit. You'll probably end up doing both. What you need to decide is the order, and how to set up the site so the two don't trip over each other. If you'd rather have someone plan it with you, our Arabic and English SEO service starts with exactly this question.

Here's what this covers:

• Who searches in which language
• How competition differs between Arabic and English results
• When English should come first
• When Arabic should come first
• The spelling and dialect problem
• Running both languages on one site
• Where to start

Who searches in which language

There's no clean split, and anyone who gives you a percentage for "Egyptians who search in English" is guessing. What we see in real Search Console data is a pattern by topic, not by person.

Local, everyday and urgent searches lean Arabic: a pharmacy nearby, a plumber, a restaurant, "أفضل دكتور أسنان". Searches about technology, software, business services, international brands and premium products lean English, even from people who speak Arabic at home. Real estate is split right down the middle, and it changes by compound and by buyer.

The same person switches too. Someone might search "best laptop for design" in English in the morning and "محل لابتوب في المعادي" in the afternoon. So stop asking whether your customers are Arabic or English speakers. Ask what they type when they're looking for what you sell.

How competition differs between Arabic and English results

English results for a broad keyword compete with the whole world. A search for "SEO tips" puts you up against sites with millions of visits and ten years of content. Add "Egypt" or a city name and it gets easier, but you're still often competing with big regional sites and directories.

Arabic results are a different story. For a lot of service and product keywords, the first page is thin: old forum posts, directory listings, short pages with little real information. Better Arabic content, written for people in Egypt and not copied from a Gulf site, can rank faster than the English equivalent.

The catch is that Arabic search volume is spread across many versions of the same query. More on that below.

When English should come first

Start with English if most of your revenue comes from people who search in English. That usually means:

• B2B services sold to companies, especially multinationals and startups
• Software, SaaS, IT and tech services
• Premium and international brands with an English-speaking audience
• Clinics, schools or services that target expats and foreign residents
• Businesses selling to the Gulf or abroad from Egypt

For these businesses, a strong English site with good service pages brings the leads that pay the bills, and Arabic can follow once those pages are working.

When Arabic should come first

Start with Arabic if you sell to the broad Egyptian market. Restaurants, local clinics, home services, mass-market e-commerce, real estate aimed at Egyptian families, education, most retail. The volume is in Arabic, the competition is often lighter, and the customer trusts a page that speaks to them the way they speak.

One honest note: if your website is English-only today and your social media is all Arabic, you're sending Arabic speakers from Instagram to a site that feels like it wasn't built for them. That costs you leads before SEO even comes into it.

The spelling and dialect problem

Arabic keyword research is more work than English, and this is the reason. The same search can be written in several ways:

• With or without hamza and taa marbuta: "اسعار" and "أسعار", "شركه" and "شركة"
• Egyptian dialect or formal Arabic: "عايز" against "أريد", "ازاي" against "كيف"
• Mixed with English: "سعر iPhone", "كورس SEO"
• Franco-Arabic, in Latin letters, mostly for brand names and short phrases

Google understands a lot of these variations and groups them, so you don't need a separate page for every spelling. But you do need to know which version your customers use most, so your headings and titles match the way they type. Our guide on keyword research for Egyptian businesses walks through how to find that out with free tools.

Running both languages on one site

If you go bilingual, the setup matters as much as the content. A few rules we follow on every project:

1. Give each language its own URL. Something like /ar/ and /en/ folders, or separate pages, so Google can index each one. A single page that swaps language with a button and the same URL usually means one version never gets indexed.
2. Connect the pairs with hreflang tags so Google knows which page is the Arabic version of which English page.
3. Don't force-redirect people by browser language or location. Let them switch, and let Google crawl both.
4. Rewrite, don't translate. An Arabic service page should be written for an Arabic reader, with the keywords they use. Machine translation of English copy rarely ranks and rarely converts.
5. Get the right-to-left layout right. Broken Arabic layouts on mobile are still common, and visitors leave fast.

Two languages also changes your budget, since content is the biggest line in any SEO plan. We break that down in SEO cost in Egypt. And if the site itself needs rebuilding to handle two languages properly, check what Google needs from a website before you pay a developer.

Where to start

Open Google Search Console, go to the Performance report and look at your queries for the last three months. Sort by impressions. You'll see in a few minutes which language people already use to find you, and where you're showing up without getting clicks.

Then write down your three most profitable services and ask: who buys these, and what would they type? That tells you which language gets your first round of pages.

If you want us to look at the data with you and build a plan for one language or both, have a look at our SEO services. We write Arabic and English in-house, for the way Egyptians search.