Arabic keyword research is not translation
Take your English keyword list, run it through a translator, and you will get a list of grammatically correct Arabic phrases that nobody types into Google. This is the single most common way Arabic SEO budgets get wasted, and it is invisible unless someone on the team reads the language.
How we handle it is part of the SEO service, and the broader picture is in local SEO in Riyadh.
Why translation fails
A translator gives you a correct word. Search needs the word people use, which is a different question.
For a single product there are often three or four plausible Arabic terms: a formal one, a borrowed English one written in Arabic script, a dialect one, and a technical one. They have wildly different search volumes, and the formal term — the one a translator returns — is regularly the least used of the four.
Spelling varies, and so do results
Arabic has genuine spelling variation in search: hamza written or omitted, taa marbuta versus haa, alef forms typed inconsistently. People search all of these, and search engines do not always treat them as identical.
That means a term can look low-volume in a tool simply because the volume is spread across spellings the tool counted separately. Checking variants is not pedantry; it is the difference between dismissing a keyword and ranking for it.
Mixed script is normal, not an edge case
Saudi searchers routinely mix scripts in one query — an Arabic sentence with a Latin brand name or model number in it. Any keyword process that treats the two languages as separate silos will miss these entirely, and they often carry the strongest purchase intent, because someone typing a model number is close to buying.
How to research it properly
Start with your customers, not a tool. What words do they use on the phone, in WhatsApp messages, in reviews? That vocabulary is your real keyword list, and it is free.
Use autocomplete in Arabic. Type your terms into Google in Arabic and read the suggestions. They come from real queries and they surface dialect forms no tool will hand you.
Check what actually ranks. Search your candidate term and look at the results. If they are all news articles or dictionary entries, the term has no commercial intent no matter what the volume says.
Compare competition per language. The same product can be brutally competitive in English and quietly open in Arabic. Check both before deciding where to spend.
Then write, do not translate
Once you know the terms, the page has to be written in Arabic rather than translated into it. A translated page carries English sentence rhythm and reads like a form, which undoes the work — the six mistakes that make an Arabic site look translated covers what that looks like in practice.
The opportunity
The reason this matters commercially is simple: most of your competitors have not done it. They have an English site with an Arabic toggle, keywords translated once, and no idea which Arabic terms convert.
That is an unusually cheap advantage in an unusually valuable market, and it is a large part of what the SEO work is for.