Arabic WooCommerce SEO

Welcome to the internet’s most comprehensive guide to Arabic WooCommerce SEO! This guide, compiled by Arabic SEO professionals, will walk you through all the necessary steps to ensure your WooCommerce store ranks highly in the Middle East. As using Arabic on the platform is relatively new, knowing how to construct a perfectly optimized website will set you apart from the competition. As statistics from 2023 show, WooCommerce is currently the most used e-commerce CMS technology, having retained its popularity for many years. You do not want to miss out on this awesome opportunity for growth.

The Most Important Part of Setup for an Arabic WooCommerce Store

The WooCommerce add-on to a WordPress site gives you a lot of flexibility to customize your shop and site exactly how you want it to be. However, with this great freedom of customization comes significant responsibility as you want to ensure that all parts of your site are compatible with language, theme, and formatting. Ensure you pay close attention to this guide to ensure you take all the necessary steps that will set you and your shop up for success.

Advantages and Cost of Using WooCommerce for your Arabic E-commerce Platform

WooCommerce is a nearly free, open source software to be used as a plugin with a WordPress site. It provides nearly endless customizable options such as theme, payment methods, and shipping. It thus allows you to personalize your site according to your particular needs, making it ideal if you have a particular vision for your Arabic store. If you are tech-savvy or like customization, this is especially good news for you!

Note: although the plugin itself is free, you will need a WordPress site compatible with plugins and a domain for your site. This means, first, paying some sort of hosting fee with costs ranging from $3.95 per month to $5,000. Second, you need to purchase a domain that costs as low as $12 a year and ranges in price depending on your chosen domain. These are non-optional costs.

Arabic Themes For WooCommerce

WordPress has become so popular that over 43% of websites worldwide utilize their services. This popularity has excellent implications for your site as content has already been developed in hundreds of languages, including Arabic. This is especially advantageous when choosing a theme for your site and WooCommerce shop. As Arabic is a right to left language (RTL), you need to find a theme that supports it instead of English which is written left to right (LTR) and makes up a majority of sites on WordPress. Although there is some trickle-down when it comes to Arabic WooCommerce themes, you still need to do thorough research to ensure it is effective. As most of these RTL themes cost money, you want to ensure you are making the right choice. If you need help choosing a theme compatible with both the Arabic language and your site, please reach out us. A fluent Arabic speaker on our team will ensure you have the most SEO friendly and language friendly theme.

Arabic Themes for Woocommerce

WooCommerce for Arabic has come a long way in the past couple years. With its optimization rates improving at a much quicker rate than many other languages, it is clear that enhancing Arabic-language readability is a priority for WooCommerce..

WooCommerce RTL CSS

If you find a theme you really like, or have already paid for one, there is a high chance that it is not already set up for right to left languages. To change this, you have to manually go into the CSS code and edit the direction so it reflects the new RTL direction for your Arabic. If you are a programmer or have some computer science background, this is not difficult, but time-consuming. Additionally, you have to re-edit the code every time there is an edit in the theme unless your use a child theme or another solution. If you have no experience with writing or editing code, we recommend you seek out extra help as you can mess up your whole site by doing this incorrectly.

Since you are looking into Arabic WooCommerce SEO, chances are you are looking to target customers in the Middle East. But did you know that there is actually a very high rate of expats in the Middle East, mostly concentrated in the wealthy Gulf region? Because of this, we have found that bilingual Arabic and English content tends to do well when marketing in the Middle East, especially in Gulf countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Making your WooCommerce site compatible with bilingual text might sound like a challenge, but there are plenty of specialized themes available for purchase that are designed for Arabic and English text.

RTL example

Arabic URLs

Though WordPress allows you to have Arabic script URLs, it may not be compatible with 3rd party plugins, so you always have to do your research to ensure that your efforts and website costs are all going to ultimately be helpful for your site. If you are just getting started we do recommend using Arabic URLs for your Arabic pages as it will get you an advantage with both Arabic SEO and improve your page click thru rates among Arabic speakers.

Manual Translation vs Machine Translation

As a place to start, WooCommerce offers an Arabic translation plugin that we recommend you download. WooCommerce also recommends visiting translate.wordpress.org using the “Loco Translate” plugin. They also suggest more advanced users can use PoEdit. However, just like with any translation, online and machine translation does not always pick up on the nuances of language that a native speaker would. Especially with elements of the Arabic language such as implied vowels, you cannot really be sure that your content says what you want unless you have a native speaker write it for you and as a general rule Arabic machine translation is usually very bad. Instead of taking shortcuts, you can seek out specialized translation experts to ensure a quality result that will improve your brand’s credibility and image rather than potentially damage it.

Arabic Woocommerce

Translated Content vs SEO Optimized Arabic Content

Although professional translators are brilliant at conveying the nuances of language, they might not be trained in the complicated world of SEO and SEO keywords. Using our Arabic keyword guide, you can comprehend how important it is to identify these top searched for words and incorporate them into your site, your pages, and your online storefront. Making sure your content isn’t just translated but is also optimized for your keywords can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic you will attract from Google.

Example of Arabic WooCommerce store
An example of an Arabic WooCommerce store.

Optimized Arabic titles, meta descriptions, and images

After you have identified these main keywords, and written your content, you want to make sure you place them into the DNA of your pages: the titles, the meta descriptions, and your images. Naturally incorporating these keywords into your own content is a great way to gain recognition and rank in search results. You probably know from your own searches, your eyes immediately go to the title and the meta description. Ensure that for an Arabic speaker, you are conveying a professional image that aligns with their interests.

Other Issues to Optimize For

Although this guide walks you through the main necessities of getting an Arabic WooCommerce guide started, there are still other things you need to double-check.

Make sure pages besides your storefront are Arabic language optimized. It is natural to spend a lot of time focusing on perfecting your shopfront while forgetting the numerous other aspects of a website that will need to be Arabic friendly such as the contact section of the website, the payment portal page, shipping (some countries don’t have zip codes), and return policies. Translating these and displaying them upfront will save you a lot of pain down the road.
Specify your currency and modes of payment. Though debit cards used to be much more commonly used in the Middle East compared to credit cards, current reports actually show that around 30% of e-commerce payments in the Middle East are done with credit cards. Mobile wallet (like Apple Pay), debit cards, and cash-on-delivery are the other top options for online payments. Keep in mind that services like Paypal tend to be less accessible in the Middle East than they are in the US or Europe.
Ensure your pictures are high-quality and culturally respectful