Arabic Squarespace SEO
To get more Arab customers for your online business, understanding detailed Arabic Squarespace SEO will give you a huge boost compared to your competitors. This detailed SEO guide will help you determine whether Squarespace should be your chosen ecommerce platform and will illustrate exactly how to have a quality, multilingual site that will grab shoppers’ attention. Take note!
The Most Important Part of Setup for an Arabic Squarespace Commerce Store
As detailed below, the most important thing to consider for Arabic Squarespace SEO is the theme and overall feature integration with a right to left language. As you read through the steps below, make sure you are paying close attention to the steps and have thought about how to optimize Arabic for your own site, whether you have one already on this platform or not. Arabic SEO takes a lot of brainstorming and critical thinking to ensure you check all the boxes.
Who is Squarespace for?
Most people know Squarespace as a high quality, out of box website and blog building platform integrated with a hosting service. However, they have recently used their intricate knowledge and experience of user-friendly internet success to delve into the ecommerce sphere. They are a significant contender for one of the best platforms and offer many unique features that could be a perfect match for your Arabic Squarespace store. Analyzing user satisfaction, ecommerce experts say the perfect market match for Squarespace Commerce are small, creative business owners with little prior web design experience. It is also perfect for those who want an extra aesthetically pleasing site to better highlight and showcase their inventories. If this does not sound like you, check out some more for our Arabic Ecommerce SEO guides.
Why do people love Squarespace Commerce?
Websites and stores built with Squarespace are proven to be some of the most aesthetic, high-quality sites on the internet today. In fact, they have even won awards for being the very top for design. The platform offers not only incredibly sleek and aesthetic themes, but also incredibly helpful features and the ability to operate an add-on blog or site to enhance the user experience and strengthen the brands’ identities. This is especially true and important for small businesses that utilize blog posts and companion sites to get exposure. Squarespace also integrates well with other selling channels like social media sites. Though Squarespace Commerce can be difficult to get a hang of right away, they luckily offer a 2-week free trial period to see if the platform is your best fit. You can also check out their helpful video series to understand more of what it takes to get started.
Arabic Themes For Squarespace Commerce
Squarespace Commerce is known for its extra glossy themes sure to grab anyone’s attention, but because they are beautiful does NOT mean they are functional for Arabic. Many of these themes were only developed for Latin script languages and will not work or look very off if you try to input Arabic in. Do your background research to ensure that your theme is not a waste of time of money. If you find one that works with Arabic, Squarespace has integration with Google Fonts which allows you to select exactly the Arabic font you want for your site. The following photo shows some Arabic sample fonts. Pretty cool!
Squarespace Commerce RTL CSS
As of now, Squarespace does not offer a built-in system to add right to left (RTL) text to their sites. However, depending on your needs, there are a few solutions that might work. For individual words and short phrases without punctuation, you can copy and paste RTL text directly into a text block and then use the text editor to adjust the alignment to align Right. For a more elaborate fix for lengthier content, you need to directly edit the site code. You do this by manually going into the back end and changing the direction of the code from right-to-left.
However, just like all custom code, you cannot be certain that these changes will work with your existing work/ theme and there could be an error that actually renders your site unusable. You must do the background work to ensure that your chosen themes/add-ons are compatible with RTL formatting, or else your work will be a waste of a lot of time!
Arabic URLs
Right now, Arabic URLs are not supported by Squarespace Commerce. However, most of the top-ranking foreign stores across the region do not use them either, so based on our data it does not make too much of a difference from a ranking perspective. That said, there have been talks about incorporating Arabic URLs in the future.
Manual Translation vs Machine Translation
In the image below, you can see how Arabic usage on websites has skyrocketed in the last few years. You thus want to ensure that you are creating Arabic content that is accurate and in line with what your target audience speaks. Unfortunately, though there are multiple really great translation applications and websites, they are unable to produce perfect translations. The most important thing is to have a fluent speaker manually go through and translate your content phrase by phrase. Cutting corners will not work here. Your content and inventory are precious, you want to ensure that you are doing them justice in your descriptions.
Translated Content vs SEO Optimized Arabic Content.
Similar to the previous point, even though someone is fluent in Arabic, does not make them an expert marketer. Thus, we suggest finding a native Arabic speaker who is well versed and trained in SEO optimization. They will be able to identify keywords and phrases that will get your site found easily and painlessly. This extra investment to find the right person will undoubtedly help your business in the long run, so it is definitely worth it! Contact us today to work directly with a fluent Arabic SEO expert.
Optimized Arabic titles, meta descriptions, and images
After your SEO Arabic specialist has completed their research to identify key trends and phrases, you need to ensure you build in those essential terms into the most visible areas of your site, the title, the meta description, on-page headings and the images. You want them to all work together and be related so the shopper does not feel misled by your descriptions. Ensure you do this for every page on your website, and all of the above three categories as well. The interconnectedness of your pages and the popular search terms will create a website that will automatically rank you higher.
Other Issues to Optimize For
Currency limitations: Unfortunately, no currencies of Middle Eastern countries are currently supported on Squarespace Commerce, so you have to clearly specify your methods of payment and how the exchange rate will work. This section has to be especially clear, so there is no confusion from the buyer.
Shipping questions: Similar to currency usage, you must be very clear about country-specific shipping instructions. Many Middle Eastern addresses are different so ensure you have done your research into what components are in country-specific addresses.
Pop Up Banners: If you plan on having any pop-up banners to advertise things like holidays or special deals, ensure that these are all Arabic and RTL friendly as well. A pop up in a language they do not understand might lead to a swift page close. Not what you want!
