Arabic SEO Agency, 10 Steps to Choose the Best in 2023

The SEO industry is booming after covid 19, and people are paying attention to SEO more than ever. Still, SEO is not dead yet, and big brands are investing more in SEO to boost their traffic or at least don't lose what they have now.

The same goes for the companies in the middle east that runs websites in Arabic language and target Arab users from the middle east and north Africa. Even international companies are investing in Arabic content and the huge market, especially in GCC countries and sometimes in other countries like Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.

Arabic SEO Agencies Flooding the Market

With the rise of this industry in the middle east, many agencies are shifting their focus from social media and paid advertising to provide new services related to getting free organic traffic from Google.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/jordan/#monthly-202112-202212

Google Algorithms

Google always tries to improve its algorithms to provide users with the best and most trusted content. Google is the number one source for users looking for medical advice or treatment for symptoms in the middle east, and the web is flooded with translated content from other languages. Here we are talking about the E.E.A.T, which is almost ZERO on the most Arabic website, and they know nothing about it.

With all these changes, all the SEO masters know that you have to change the SEO strategy and how to do your SEO. the old techniques will sometimes still work with you. Still, with the new technologies and high market competition in the middle east, you will find yourself stuck in the same place if you think that SEO is only keyword research.

Arabic SEO is More Than Keyword Research, ALT Text, and Submitting an XML Sitemap

Still, many Arabic SEO agencies think that SEO is doing keyword research using a paid tool and updating the page title. And they tell the client to add ALT text to their images, calling it technical SEO.

No, these audits are wasting time, and they are not the real SEO work your business needs to rank or compete with other competitors.

Many websites in the Middle East use new technologies like Next.js and other Javascript frameworks. When an agency comes to audit their website, they don't pay attention to how they render their pages or if they have an SSR version!

I can tell that 95% of Arabic SEO agencies know nothing about technical SEO; they provide a basic audit using paid tools like SEMrush (they have nice colored reports) or sometimes free tools.

This is the truth, and in this article, I will help you choose the best Arabic SEO agency for your business by following the steps I created to decide and compare which one will help you grow your business.

10 Steps for Choosing an Arabic SEO Agency in 2023

These are the main points you should consider if you are looking for an Arabic SEO agency.

1 - Are They a Real Agency or Selling Leads?

Did you know that many agencies that provide Arabic SEO services are not agencies? They get leads (clients) from paid ads, social media, and organic traffic, then sell them to bigger agencies.

It is a well-known marketing model called lead generation. They flood the internet with landing pages and keywords to rank on specific terms and fool you with fake testimonials and case studies to show off.

Be aware of these agencies, and always ask them to meet their team, or you can do your homework by visiting their Linkedin page (if they have one) and checking the number of people working in this agency and check their profile to see if they are real people or fake profiles.

2 - Do They Speak Arabic?

You are looking to optimize your Arabic website and looking for an agency to do the job for you. This is the first question you should ask yourself. If they don't speak Arabic, how will they understand your website?

Many companies provide Arabic SEO services but don't have Arabic speakers on their teams. These agencies are based outside the Middle East and generate website landing pages to rank for the keywords people use to find Arabic SEO agencies or even Arabic content writing services.

To ensure they speak Arabic, you should visit their Linkedin page (if they have one), look at their people tab, and see which countries they live in and their names. And even you can check their profiles and the content they share.

If you notice that they are not Arabs, please don't work with them. They will use tools to do a basic SEO job for you, like keyword research and automated technical audit that will not help you.

Below is an example of one of the agencies based in the UK. They have a landing page saying that they provide SEO for Arabic websites. The funny thing is that on their LinkedIn, they have more than 70 employees, and none are Arab or based in the Middle East. (maybe they will use Google Translate or Chat-GPT to optimize your website)

3 - Meet Their Team

Always ask the agency to meet their team to learn more about them and their experience and working history. By doing this, you will talk to the team and make sure that they are a real agency and that they speak Arabic.

4 - Bring Your Developers to the Meeting

Some SEOs are afraid of talking to developers. They don't like to talk with tech people because many don't have experience in the technical side of the web.

Ask technical questions to see if they have experience solving big website issues. And ask them about their success stories with clients, what they have achieved, and how.

5 - Check Their Linkedin Posts

To make sure they know what they are proposing to you, always check the posts their team share on Linkedin and see if they create content or reshare posts from others.

Resharing content on Linkedin is good, as it's sharing knowledge with others. However, you are still sharing what others are saying, and you are not adding anything new to people's lives and not influencing others or sharing your experience or experiments.

If their team creates content, they are trusted and will help you with your SEO. Sharing experiments and success stories from their clients or even personal projects will give you more confidence that this team will do the job for you.

6 - Don't Let the Big Brands Names Fool You

Many agencies put logos for big international brands on their website in the client's area. They think by showing you that they did SEO for these brands, they will convince you to work with them.

Let me tell you something, the big and popular companies don't need SEO. The brand name is enough to bring them more traffic than any other keyword.

Big brands are trusted by Google more than any other website, and if the user is looking for services or items from a certain brand, they will search for the brand name on Google, not a generic term.

So don't look for agencies that work for famous brands. Always look for agencies that solved problems and ranked for un-branded keywords.

7 - Ask for a Live Audit of Your Website

Live audits are my favorite part of SEO, where you can talk to the client and show him what is wrong with his website and how to fix them.

Once you have your developers in the meeting, let them ask the agency questions about the servers, HTML, JS, or other technical areas. And ask them about what are the best practices for handling the requests from Google bots and how they analyze the access log file. Ask them about the data, how they analyze it, and which tools they use for reporting.

You can ask the agency many questions to ensure they will give you the best service and know what they are doing. 

8 - SEO & Reporting Tools

Many agencies are still using Excel sheets to chart and analyze your content. What if you have millions of pages?

Using tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Python scripts for analyzing the data and content will be a huge pro for this agency to win more clients by showing them that they are up to date with the latest tools and techniques.

9 - Team Members With Weird Job Role Titles

I laugh when I visit some SEO agencies' profiles on Linkedin and look at their team members' roles. They have job role titles that are not related to SEO or even to our industry or our planet.

Usually, and in each average SEO agency, they have two or three positions related to SEO, and from my experience, I can tell that each SEO team should have the below

If you find an agency that provides Arabic SEO services with weird job roles like senior research development UX officer outbound marketing, please don't contact them.

10 - How Do They Solve Your Website's Technical Issues?

This is a very important question for any Arabic SEO agency provider, how do they solve your website's issues?

Many SEO agencies provide a report from tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush that includes only the issues without the solutions or how to solve them.

These types of agencies rely on tools that generate automated weekly and monthly reports. These reports are good for monitoring your website health for basic parts like missing page titles, H1, meta descriptions, or missing canonicals.

But these tools can't tell you what is happening on your website and server for major issues, especially page speed, rendering, or content indexing.

For this type of issue, human work should be done, and a manual audit should be done by technical SEOs and provide you with the problem and how to solve it.

For major issues, I usually prefer to work with the developer to ensure they are doing their job correctly by providing them with the solutions and sometimes sharing samples of the code or even the code that will be used on the production server.

Any technical SEO audit should contain the issue and how to solve it by providing steps to investigate it or the final solution and code snippets.

Recommendations for the Best Arabic SEO Agencies

many people are asking me to recommend an Arabic SEO agency that provides SEO and Arabic content services, and I refuse to recommend any of them.

Of course, there are many good Arabic SEO agencies in the market. For example, agencies with good reputations and great teams in Jordan and Dubai provide Arabic SEO and other digital marketing services like social media, paid advertising, and web solutions.