Dubai is the largest online market with 93% of the population online and active. For any business looking to scale, Dubai is the most effective market to be tapped into.
Despite westernization, the Arabs strongly withhold their values and beliefs. And, tapping into the Dubai market isn’t as easy as you think. They live with their own set of rules and to be able to market to them, you need to localize your content online.
Posting quality content online doesn’t mean you’ll have a crowd of customers waiting at your doorstep. Even the most amazing content falls flat on its face if it isn’t optimized for SEO. Good content and SEO work hand-in-hand. Hence, only quality content optimized for SEO brings in visibility, engagement, and leads.
Since we’re talking about generating leads through SEO in Dubai, let’s dive right in!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to the techniques that help your website rank higher on the search engine increasing visibility. Subsequently driving more potential customers leads to higher conversions and an increase in revenue.
How does SEO work?
SEO works by optimizing the web content, thorough keyword research, and earning backlinks to boost visibility and ranking on the SERP. SEO doesn’t work instantly, it takes months to bear fruitful results.
SEO mainly works to increase visibility and ranking. The ranking starts from zero and climbs up slowly if the content is thoroughly optimized and written with the user intent in mind. Visibility occurs when the content shows up in the search results and ranking is responsible for it. Together ranking and visibility help attain the SEO objectives – authority and traffic.
SEO best practices to rank in the UAE market
With 60% of the people searching the brand online before making a purchase and 75% of them not going past Google’s first page results it’s inevitable to optimize your site for SEO.
If you don’t make it to the first page, then you’re losing out on a lot of business. SEO helps you rank on the SERPs – the first step to increasing the visibility of your site.
By following the 9 best practices for SEO listed in this article, you can increase the possibility of ranking on your targeted keywords.
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research is the practice of searching and analyzing the popular terms people enter into search engines. These terms or phrases are carefully placed into the content to make it visible and rank higher when a user runs a search.
Keyword research is not just about finding words and phrases that are relevant to your product or business. There’s more to it. You also need to analyze the keyword ranking possibility and search intent of your target audience which helps them find what you’re selling and eventually buy from you.
After a quick keyword search on google, you can analyze the articles that are already ranking and see if you can outperform them. You will also find out other related keywords (secondary keywords) for your primary keyword (core keyword).
2. Compelling content
Content IS king. When a user searches, he’s looking for content, for information on something.
The content might be in any format like video, web page, blog, article, product review/recommendation, etc. The foremost thing to do before optimizing the content for SEO is to write compelling content. Because SEO can make the content reach its target audience and gain visibility only if it’s well written.
When a user makes a search query, the most relevant content will be shown to him. It’s because while crawling the content the algorithm determines the structure and relevance of the content to the keyword. It also ensures that it matches the search intent of the user.
3. Address the topic in-depth
The average length of the blog posts should be between 2100 – 2500 words. To rank on the target keywords, your content must cover the topic thoroughly.
You can follow these steps to cover the topic in-depth:
- Run a quick google search for the keyword and check the content ranking on top of the search engine. Analyze what have they covered and more importantly what have they left. It makes it easier for you to craft content that’s unique to your brand.
- Answering all the pressing questions of the audience will help you in ranking your content on the search engine. You can keep a tab on this by questioning your audience or as the industry thought leader, you must answer all the potential questions that might be asked in the content.
- Make sure your content keeps flowing and doesn’t feel like it was forcefully placed in. A user might come to your article for your value, but if it ain’t served then they might bounce off to another piece of content making it rank later on.
4. Avoid keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the process of spamming keywords into the content to make it rank higher on the search engine. This tactic used to work in ancient times but not anymore. It negatively impacts the ranking on the search engines leading to low organic traffic.
One way to rank on the search engine by avoiding keyword stuffing is to use secondary keywords over the article. There are a few tips to rank on the keyword, being:
- Use your primary keyword once
- Include 3-5 secondary keywords
- Add keywords to headlines
- Place the keywords organically into the content
5. Structure the content
Crafting the structure of your topic with title, H1, H2, H3, etc, makes it easy for the bots to crawl your content. According to SEMrush, 47% of the content with advanced headings like h1, H2, H3, and H4 is among the top-performing content. Structuring content creates an outline that makes it easier for the reader to skim through the content and jump into the sections they’re looking for easily.
Structuring the content is an important part of SEO and it’s always overlooked.
6. Interlink your content
Interlinking is the most important part of SEO. It is the process of linking one page with another page of your site.
People put in a lot of effort on backlinks but forget about interlinks. Internal linking helps the bots to crawl and index your content. Make sure to only link related content together. E.g., Imagine that content A is useful for the target audience. Think about other content that can be useful to them. Then link content A with content B & C.
Interlinking helps in increasing the session duration of your site by increasing the number of connected content that makes the audience stay on it.
7. Earn Backlinks
Backlinks are the links that refer to your content on a different site. Backlinks play a crucial role in helping your content rank higher on the SERPs.
Despite the changes in google’s algorithm, it still considers backlinks as a vote of confidence. Hence, you should focus on building high-quality backlinks that help you in ranking higher on the sear engine for your target keyword.
Analyze your competitors’ link-building strategies and replicate them for yourself to build authoritative backlinks.
8. Optimize meta title and meta descriptions
Meta titles and meta descriptions are the two of the most important things in optimizing the content.
Meta title is the clickable link that appears in search results that describes the topic in 60 characters or less. They impact the search rankings so it’s better to be careful about it.
Here are a few best practices to keep in mind for creating a meta title:
- Include the target keyword
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Be clear and concise
- Make sure the title matches the search intent
Meta description is a brief summary of the content that appears below the title tag. They directly impact the click-through rates of the content.
Meta descriptions are usually 160 characters so make sure you write ana persuasive summary that makes the reader click on your article.
Here are a few practices to keep in mind for creating a meta description:
- Include the target keyword
- Write a brief summary of the topic
- Make sure the title matches the search intent
- Write a unique description from others
9. Optimize images
Most of us spend a large portion of time stressing about the images to add but most of the time don’t even think about optimizing them.
Optimizing the images contributes to your overall SEO and impacts your rankings. Here are 3 things you can do to optimize the images:
- Choose the best image format: Site loading speed also plays an important role in search engine ranking. And images are the largest contributors to it. Images in webP format will help improve the site loading speed in turn increases the chances of ranking higher.
- Compress the image size: The larger the image size the longer it takes for the page to load. Hence, it is best to compress the images to improve the site loading speed.
- Add Alt text for images: Alt text helps the browsers to understand the images better. One tip here is to add accurate Alt texts and avoid keyword stuffing as it might lead to your content being considered spam.
Local SEO
We’ve been studying SEO for site ranking since. But, if you’re a local business, google also helps you rank your business in front of your potential customers in a specific location. And, for that, you need to use local SEO.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is the SEO strategy that helps your business appear in the local search results. For example: when a person searches ‘restaurants near me’ 3 results pop up on the nearest first basis.
With 46% of the google searches made by people looking for a product/service in their local area, optimizing your website for a local SEO is clearly beneficial for your business.
72% of the users visit the local store within 24 hours of the search. Hence, local SEO helps your business to be found both online and offline.
How does local SEO work?
Optimizing your site for Local SEO is a technique to bring visibility to your business through Google’s local search results. Local SEO is the way to go if you’re trying to get visible to your target audience both online and offline. Businesses looking to market to people in specific locations need to get familiar with local SEO.
40% of the people in the UAE use search engines to find local businesses. This means most of your potential customers get to know about you from a local search.
Assume you run a restaurant in Al Karama, Dubai.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of restaurants in the city, and it’s almost impossible for you to stand out among them without optimizing for local SEO. When you optimize your site for local SEO, your business pops up on the Google search when someone’s looking for restaurants in your vicinity.
Local SEO heightens your possibilities of attracting new customers.
Here are certain best practices to increase your business’s local search visibility:
1. Create your Google business profile
2. Optimize your google business profile
3. Optimize your website
4. Build a good reputation
5. Build local backlinks
6. Adhere to google rules and regulations
7. Update your business profile and website
How a professional SEO agency can help you bring in sales
UAE is a conservative country and there are a lot of local laws anything that creates conflicts. Marketing in the UAE is very different than in the west because of its cultural sensitivity.
You need to understand the local laws and morals before you go ahead with anything as a violation can land get you banned on search engines and worse put you behind the bars.
With a substantial increase of 25% in the new businesses in Dubai in 2022, the competition has increased. Handling all the digital marketing in-house is a recipe for disaster and hence it’s better to hire a digital marketing agency to take care of your digital footprint because,
1. they are already specialized in bringing organic traffic, leads and conversions
2. hiring an agency is less expensive compared to hiring someone full-time – you don’t have to pay any incentives.
And, if you’re looking for an SEO agency in Dubai to help you reach your customers online reach out to us, today.
