Should your store be in Arabic?

The opportunity, stated plainly

Commercial search in the UAE splits roughly evenly between English and Arabic. Arabic keywords generally carry substantially lower competition than their English equivalents, which means ranking is cheaper and faster there.

Meanwhile most businesses put the overwhelming majority of their search budget into English. That gap is the single cheapest traffic available in this market.

What a bilingual store actually requires

More than translated copy, and this is where projects underestimate the work.

• Right-to-left layout. Arabic does not just change the words — the whole page mirrors. Navigation, tables, forms, price alignment, icons with direction.
• One catalogue, two languages. Product data maintained once with translations attached, not two stores that slowly disagree with each other.
• Search in both. A customer searching in Arabic should find products entered in English.
• The app too, if you have one — same two languages in the same build.

What machine translation gets wrong

It is a good first draft and a bad final one.

The specific failure is category names and product terms. Translation tools produce technically correct Arabic that no shopper would actually type — and category names are exactly what people search. Getting those wrong means the Arabic version ranks for nothing, which is the whole reason you built it.

Have a native speaker review the result. It is a few hours of work and it decides whether the exercise was worth doing.

Where to start

Not with everything. Start with the pages that carry commercial intent — your top categories, your best-selling products, the checkout — and leave the long tail in English until the shape is proven.

Adding Arabic later does not mean rebuilding. How the bilingual storefront works →