Bilingual EN/AR websites that actually rank in Saudi Arabia and the UAE

Most agencies treat Arabic as an afterthought — a translated copy paste dropped into a right-to-left layout, with the same URL structure, the same meta tags, and no hreflang. Google sees two versions of the same page competing against each other for the same keywords. The result: neither ranks well. We have built bilingual websites for clients across Saudi Arabia and the UAE since 2017 and the difference between sites that rank and sites that do not almost always comes down to a handful of technical and editorial choices.

The hreflang attribute tells search engines which version of a page to serve to which audience. Without it, Google will arbitrarily pick one version as the canonical and ignore the other — or worse, treat them as duplicate content. Every page pair on a bilingual Gulf site needs three hreflang declarations: en (or en-SA / en-AE), ar (or ar-SA / ar-AE), and x-default pointing to the English version. Our Next.js setup generates these automatically from the alternates field in the Metadata API, so there is no risk of them falling out of sync as the site grows.

• Use language-region codes (ar-SA, en-AE) where intent is locale-specific
• x-default must resolve — do not point it at a 404
• Self-referential hreflang on each page: the English page declares its own en href
• Sitemaps should include all locale variants, not just the default language

A proper RTL implementation uses CSS logical properties throughout: margin-inline-start instead of margin-left, padding-inline-end instead of padding-right. Components like breadcrumbs, icon-plus-label pairs, and progress indicators must mirror their direction without custom overrides for every element. On this site we use Tailwind's logical utilities (me-, ms-, ps-, pe-) exclusively for directional spacing, and the dir attribute is set at the html element level from the locale parameter. Critically, the Arabic font (IBM Plex Arabic in our current stack) must be loaded alongside the Latin display font — mixing fonts inside a single text string degrades rendering quality.

The Arabic search market in Saudi Arabia and the UAE has its own keyword landscape. Terms that drive high volume in English (e.g. 'web design agency') have different Arabic equivalents that users actually type — sometimes formal Modern Standard Arabic, sometimes Gulf dialect spellings. A direct translation often targets a keyword that no one searches. We recommend running Arabic keyword research independently, not by translating the English list, and building Arabic page copy around the terms that have measurable search volume in the target country. Title tags, H1s, and meta descriptions in Arabic should be crafted by a native speaker, not a machine translator, for the same reason.

• Research Arabic keywords independently — do not translate from your English list
• Check search intent: Gulf users often phrase queries differently from Levantine or Egyptian users
• Include Arabic schema markup (Organization name in both scripts, areaServed in Arabic)
• Page speed matters equally in Arabic — a slow RTL page loses rankings just as fast