With the biggest e-commerce market in Middle East region, Saudi Arabia holds vast opportunities for those looking to market their products and services in the region. This article will discuss some facets of reaching a Saudi Arabian audience with your search engine optimization efforts. Of course, one article cannot sum up all the strategies for reaching an audience in the KSA, but here we will reveal eight keys to effective SEO in Saudi Arabia.

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In light of the fact that we have found it difficult to find an online resource that provides multi-lingual Internet marketers with Arabic translations of commonly used SEO terms we created such a glossary in this blog post.  Since the Arabic SEO industry is still relatively young in the Middle East some who read this post may use other SEO jargon not listed here or may have alternate Arabic translations or definitions for the vocabulary below.  This list is a work in progress, so your suggestions are welcome in the comment section below in English or in Arabic.  Also, new jargon comes into use on at least a yearly basis, so if you see a new term missing from this list, be sure to post and let us know. (more…)

Though the world of Arabic PPC is always expanding, many new ad campaigns fail to be effective due to several common mistakes. Any ad campaign run in Arabic needs to be optimized just as an English campaign needs to be optimized. We find many companies try to save money by outsourcing translation of ads or by having Arabic ads run by someone without experience running Arabic PPC campaigns. In most cases we’ve seen this ends up costing the company much more in wasted ad-spend, than the company saves from not hiring a professional to run the ads. We’ve literally seen companies waste tens of thousands of dollars on irreverent keywords and targeting in their ad campaigns in an effort to save a small amount on the management side of running ads.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the most frequent mistakes we see in Arabic PPC campaigns in the MENA region so you can avoid these pitfalls in your own efforts. 
 

1. Using poorly written or nonexistent calls to action

When creating ads in Arabic, it’s important to utilize similar calls to action, like “buy,” “find,” or “shop.” Without these calls to action, the meaning of the ad can become unclear to the customer. For example, the ad below is for a company that finances Islamic real estate purchases, meaning they provide a specific kind of financing for Muslim customers. The ad was generated while searching for      “عقارات لندن” (London real estate) and it advertises mortgage financing. However, the ad’s wording leaves the user without a call to action, opting to instead state the services offered. For a list of Arabic calls to action you should be using, see this article.

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If you are running PPC campaigns in multiple languages its important to know the character limits for each line within your Google Adwords ad to best utilize the ad space provided to you. However, if you wanted to run an Arabic PPC campaign you might be surprised to find that there is a lot of conflicting information on the web about character limits for Arabic ad texts. Many websites that discuss this topic reference information that is out dated or inaccurate. These sites appear to state that your ad title should be 12 characters and each line of the ad text should be just 17 Arabic characters but this isn’t accurate. By doing a search for any product that will bring up Arabic ads within the Middle East region you quickly realize that Arabic advertisement texts are much longer than the limits mentioned above.

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