- Culture and more importantly the cultural impact and implication of your marketing actions
- Language and more importantly how the language you are using translates to Arabic
- Opportunities for promotion, naturally variations can be found in every culture based on what is accepted and more importantly, what is not
Bearing these elements in mind will help you to create a strong marketing strategy for your website. But how can you get Arabic visitors to your Arabic website? Search Engines of course!
Arabic Search Engines
Most purchasing decisions are started with a search on one of the many search engines. Getting your service, product or brand to show up well on these search engines can often make or break your online success.
In Arabic-speaking cultures these are the major search engines...
Strongest presence in the market, no surprise here
Yahoo
strong market presence and indeed has a large Ad network in the Middle East
Bing
Although it is not as strong as other international search engine players there is evidence that suggests that a lot of Arabic speaking people have kept Hotmail accounts rather than moving to Gmail accounts, keeping Bing as an active player.
No difference here than with a lot of western countries search engines usage, even in the Arabic-speaking cultures Google makes the majority of search traffic. Indeed, there is a Google search engine for each Arabic speaking country.
Algeria – www.google.dz
Bahrain – www.google.com.bh
Egypt – www.google.com.eg
Iraq – www.google.com.iq
Kuwait – www.google.com.kw
Lebanon – www.google.com.lb
Libya – www.google.com.ly
Morocco – www.google.co.ma
Oman – www.google.com.om
Palestine – www.google.ps
Qatar – www.google.com.qa
Saudi Arabic – www.google.com.sa
Tunisia – www.google.tn
United Arab Emirates (UAE) - www.google.ae
Arabic Only Search Engines
All of these Arabic search engines were created a good 6+ years ago to fill a gap in the search engine marketplace. At this point in time the main search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo) as we know them today actually were not able to work with Arabic characters and therefore struggled to give Arabic-speaking cultures good search results.
As time has moved on the investment in Arabic language search engines, and other major non-western characters languages such as Chinese, by the big international search engine has progressed hugely. This has left a 50/50 split in the use of Arabic search engines.
Indeed if a strictly Arabic language search engine wanted to penetrate the marketplace now they would need to offer something that Google cannot offer. Considering Google’s domination of the marketplace, and its continuous heavy investment in improving its search engine, it seems unlikely that a strictly Arabic language search engine would be able to set itself beyond Google’s offerings.
So, on the one hand, we have the increased use of Google Arabic search engine due to its continued use as a marketing tool and also due to its popularity amongst users. But on the other hand, we have the continued use of the strictly Arabic search engines such as Yamli which has gained and managed to keep its users from 6+ years ago.
So which one to use?
Arabic Online Marketing
It is key for online marketing in Arabic-speaking countries and cultures that appearance of your product, service or brand is presented well in search engines, both in the big international players such as Google and in the strictly Arabic search engines like Yamli.
Knowing how to target top positions in both these search engines takes dedicated effort, including A/B testing to produce the best results.
Looking for help with your Arabic online marketing? Contact our team here at ExtraDigital today on +44 (0) 1227 68 68 98 and speak to one of our in-house Arabic team members.
