A translated page ranks like a translated page
Arabic search in the Gulf is less contested than English and converts better, and most of that advantage is thrown away by publishing English pages with the words swapped.
You can, and it will underperform a page written in Arabic, because the queries are not translations of each other. People search Arabic in a different register and often about a different half of the problem, so a translated page answers a question nobody typed.
The query is not the sentence
English queries in this market skew technical and vendor led. Arabic queries for the same commercial intent are frequently phrased as a problem or a price question, and mix Latin product names into Arabic sentences in ways no translator would produce unprompted.
A page translated from English contains the English framing in Arabic words. It matches nothing well.
What written-in-Arabic actually means
Start from the question as it is asked, not from the English page. Keep product names in Latin where that is how they are typed. Let the structure differ from the English version, because the reader arrived with a different question and does not need the same three headings.
The result is a sibling page rather than a mirror, and the two can honestly point at each other with hreflang because both are real.
Why it is worth doing first
Arabic pages in this sector face less competition per query and are far more likely to be the only good answer rather than the eleventh. On the sites we look after, Arabic is a large share of traffic and a larger share of enquiries.
What to take from this
- 01Arabic queries carry a different framing, not the same one in Arabic
- 02Write from the question, not from the English page
- 03Keep Latin product names in Latin, because that is how they are typed
- 04Less competition per query is the whole opportunity
Ask the question directly
- Should the Arabic site have the same page count?
- Not necessarily. Some English pages have no Arabic demand and some Arabic questions have no English equivalent. Forcing parity produces pages that exist to fill a grid.
- Does machine translation help as a first pass?
- As a glossary, sometimes. As a draft, it reproduces the English structure, which is the thing that has to change, so it usually costs more to fix than to write.
Related answers
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