Dammam SEO Guide
Any savvy digital marketer seeking to grow in the Middle East needs to understand SEO in Dammam to position their business in the fastest growing city in both Saudi Arabia and the greater Arab World. The capital of Eastern Saudi Arabia is more than just an administrative center, it is also a massive commerce hub attracting talent and investment from around the world. This detailed guide will move you through the most effective Dammam SEO steps to set your business apart and ahead in this strategic city.
Why Dammam is worth targeting with your SEO efforts
Located nearly 60 miles away from the world’s largest oil fields, Dammam has experienced a boom of wealth and business growth in the last 70 years. In only a decade, the city went from a sparsely populated seaside village to a city with a population of 1,352,912 people. Today, it is the largest city in the Eastern Province, and the fifth largest in Saudi Arabia, after Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. It is the center of the Dammam Metropolitan Area, which together with cities Al Khobar and Dharan forms part of the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Saudi Arabia. These oil fields have attracted a lot of international business and talent and tens of thousands of expats have moved here. Foreign investments make up a major part of the Saudi economy, accounting for nearly 25% of the country’s GDP in 2023.
Dammam thus lives and breathes business and the infrastructure reflects that. The King Fahd International Airport is the largest airport in the world in terms of land and the King Abdul Aziz Sea Port, the largest port on the Persian Gulf and the second largest (only after Jeddah) in terms of import/export traffic in all the Middle East or North Africa. The King Abdul Aziz Port controls massive amounts of cargo, and as of 2024 it is handling all-time high levels of containers and ship traffic. Every day, tens of thousands of new people with new goods and new ideas arrive in Dammam. Dammam is connected to Riyadh and Jeddah by Highway 40 to the West Coast; to Bahrain by the 28 km long King Fahd Causeway; and to other Middle-Eastern countries such as Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
What makes now the perfect time to expand your business to Dammam
As all of Saudi starts to transition away from oil to invest in other sectors, Dammam will be a major city driving this innovation. In fact, Saudi Arabia just reached a milestone in that non-oil revenue made up 50% of their GDP for the first time. Saudi Arabia on a whole is at the forefront of the e-commerce market in the Middle East, making Dammam a great location to target for an online marketing campaign. An online behavior report from 2023 shows that over 72% of Saudi Arabians made an online purchase this past year, as the total e-commerce market size in the Kingdom reached USD $13.61 billion with steady expected growth throughout the next few years. Currently the top e-commerce sectors in Saudi Arabia are electronics, fashion, and personal and beauty care.
The culture of growth and innovation is embedded in the Dammam’s DNA, as we are seeing through the many current development projects underway to accommodate new residents, businesses, and industrial facilities. Dammam’s infrastructure is ready and able to support millions of people and their substantial bank accounts; it’s time for your business to position itself to succeed in this new wave!
Keys to ranking in Dammam
1. Dammam Keyword Research
The first and arguably the most important step is to determine what content is actually wanted by Dammam’s inhabitants. You could produce the most quality written content, but it will all be for naught unless the topic is actually interesting to the people who live here. There are many free online tools to aid you in your search such as Google’s keyword planner, Wordtracker, and Ranktracker.
2. Assigning keywords to the proper pages
In order to catch all the variations of searches, it is important to find related keywords to the ones you identified in the previous step. Once you have these maps, you can start assigning them to your site’s corresponding pages. In many cases, you may need to make new pages to ensure an authentic distribution throughout your content.
A great place to look for related keywords is the bottom of a Google search. Google is already telling you right there what is related. Here is an example of related keywords to “restaurants in Dammam”. You can find top related terms such as “Pakistani”, “Indian”, and “Buffet”.
3. Use your target keywords in the Title, URL, and Meta description
When items come up in a Google search, web surfers only have a slight peek into what the article is about with the Title, the URL, and the Meta description. Thus, you need to strategically place your identified keywords into these prominent outward-facing elements of your article. If your keywords are placed here well, it not only is a signal to the search engines that this is important, but it also conveys reputability to the reader.
4. Content
Now that you have done all the necessary research to advantageously position yourself, comes arguably the most important step: actually writing out the content! You can have the most perfectly optimized site, but you aren’t going to capture the reader’s attention unless you are delivering quality content. Ensure you are writing informative and engaging material that is respectful of Saudi tradition and is not filled with fluff. You will also want to keep in mind that Saudi Arabia has conservative online censorship regulations, so ensuring that your content is fully appropriate is an important step to avoid the possibility of censorship, which would be detrimental to your campaign and your brand’s local reputation.
5. Local Dammam backlinks
An excellent way to build rank is to find local businesses that have agreed to post links to your site. These backlinks create more connections for you and signal to the search engines that whatever is on your page is important. This step is daunting, especially if you are not in the country, so the following sites are a good place to start for making connections:
- Business Clubs for Your Industry
- Dammam Event Sites
- Business Directories
- Vendor Websites
- Expat pages
- Dammam industry Facebook groups to start to make connections
6. User experience for Dammam website visitors
Similar to any other website, your credibility will be assessed by visitors instantaneously according to the quality of their user experience. You want to ensure it is bilingual, welcoming, respectful of local customs and standards, and easy to navigate. Graphics, colors, sizing, and font considerations are critical to your success as well. Looking at best practices of Dammam’s already ranking websites will help you to transfer these qualities to your business as well. Also, considering the fact that Saudi Arabia has an extremely high smartphone penetration rate of 97%, you will definitely want to make sure that your site is accessible from a mobile interface, as you can be sure that a great amount of traffic will come from mobile users.
The following is a screenshot from Amazon.sa, which is currently one of the top most popular eCommerce business websites in Saudi. You can also observe the country, and language toggle at the top left of the page.
Other important parts to ranking in Dammam
The Arabic Language
Dammam is an especially unique Saudi city due to the massive quantity of expats that live here thanks to the oil industry. Out of the city’s total population, 25% are non-Saudi. While these thousands of foreigners speak a multitude of different languages, Arabic still reigns supreme as the city’s most used language for personal and professional matters. Depending on your target market, you can always include others, but it is generally recommended to use a combination of Arabic and English. As you can see in the screenshot above from Amazon.sa, giving users the option to switch between Arabic and English easily is also a good choice for optimizing your site for the Saudi market. Along with Amazon.sa, many of the other top Saudi e-commerce companies offer this option on their sites.
For more information about doing SEO groundwork in Arabic, check out our other guides:
Using the .sa or .com.sa Domain
Currently, only a small percentage of Saudi ranking websites actually have adopted the .sa or .com.sa domain. From this, we can infer that it is not crucial to have it for business success. However, could it potentially give you a competitive advantage? Yes, of course. But there are absolutely more significant factors to consider when building your site. Ensure you master steps 1-6 above before pondering this question.
Regional Hosting
Unfortunately, the Kingdom does not currently have high quality hosting sites. But luckily for Dammam, the city is just across the water from one of the foremost hosting options in the entire Arab World, Bahrain. Your business can thus benefit tremendously from one of the top-notch Bahraini hosting sites, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). The proximity will yield rapid load times, which will strongly benefit your business.
Geo-targeting parts of Dammam
As Dammam is a massive city with a highly diverse population, it would be helpful to pinpoint where exactly you would like to reach with your efforts. Learning the neighborhoods where commerce, expats, industry, restaurants, and entertainment thrive will help you to create more targeted content. In no time, you will be ranking highly in these specific districts.
The following image is a comprehensive map of the population and industry distribution.
Conclusion
We hope you found this comprehensive guide to SEO in Dammam helpful! If you have any questions or want help ensuring your business is ahead of the curve for this strategic city, contact us today.
Sources:
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/real-estate/416331-sat-office-demand-expected-to-grow-in-dammam
https://www.futuresaudicities.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Dammam_English.pdf
