If you rank SEO over SEO’s, you can rank anything!

since our launch, we thought competing for an “Arabic SEO agency” would be impossible, so our team aimed to rank “SEO agency” in Amman and Jordan, a local search query with supposedly a decent competition, a medium keyword difficulty with a good amount of search volume, we wrongly assumed that it will take a year, we’ve done it in less than 3 months due to the mediocre competition

Rank locally first and build your authority outwards

for a start, we always recommend our clients to niche down, assess their business model, try to be as specific as you can in terms of services or products you offer, and geographically specific too.

if the city where your business is located has weaker competition than the capital, then rank within 30km first, by optimizing your content for local search queries, “keyword + location” for example “auto repair al Dammam”, the return on investment would be much profitable – cost to benefit – compared to “auto repair Riyadh, or Saudi Arabia”

therefore, we would not succeed if we targeted “Arabic SEO agency” from the start, in order to succeed in 2021 you cannot rely on the old methods only, by old methods we mean on-site and off-site factors, those are essential and if you don’t get it right you will never progress, but clicks and engagement are the signals that will move the needle for top 3 placement.

by placing on the first page, and optimizing for the user, by actually offering something valuable, like our free SEO audit.

Funneling the Traffic and Optimizing for Users

we offered a resource that it’s applicable, valuable, took months for us to develop, and we offered it for free for users who actually need it, that they were willing to engage and fill the form to receive it, those valuable clicks and signals showed google that our website is satisfying the searcher’s intent fully.

no one knows the domain mapsofarabia.com/ however potential customers search for SEO services, agency and company, we optimized the whole experience to be as smooth as possible starting from search, to the landing page which was the homepage, that have a prominent call to action button.

they can scroll down and spend time on-site watching the videos or checking briefly our services and the updated blog, fast loading and secured website that navigation is expectable, no fancy design that kills page speed to impress users.

whoever searches for SEO cannot careless about beauty, it’s plain information about what they are after.

they can jump to request an audit anywhere on the page while clicking avg 14 clicks before submitting the contact form.

indeed, it’s a pain to send audits that takes hours to prepare for free, yet it’s priceless to build a relationship with a local business that we can actually help! besides the SEO ranking return.

the old days of blogging about a product or service, and expecting people to find it and buy from you are long gone, indeed you need content to rank, else you wouldn’t have anything to optimize. but what type of content! people! blogs are easy to produce, almost 70% of the internet are blog pages and people still prefer to absorb content in text, why not include videos too! and long forms of podcasts.

ideally, you should produce a text file, along with a video one and even a podcast covering the same topic, each to be distributed on its right channel. users are everywhere on the internet and they receive information differently.

it’s your job as a digital marketer to deliver your message depending on the right medium for all your audience segments.

it’s worth mentioning, that optimizing your Arabic website for local SEO properly, would even place you above the local pack, the website ranked even above google maps! and on other searches like local SEO agency Amman the google my business profile showed as a knowledge panel, eliminating competitors from showing in the top 3 map listings.

also, buying geo-targeted domains as .sa and .ae instead of .com will help local rankings in Saudi Arabia or Arab emirates. but winning over a meter or a mile is the same, winning is winning, and ranking 1st is good enough.

Everyone is Buying Links, but no one talks about it

every once in and awhile you hear the SEO is dead, it will never die as long as there are organic results, period.

over the past 20 years in the SEO industry, a lot has changed, some changes and updates were drastic like penguin and panda updates where the big g is getting smarter detecting spammy and irrelevant links, which is awesome and debatable.

however, 80%-90% of SEO remained the same, there is always new techniques and hacks within the 10% areas, but if you got your on-site right, producing helpful and “good content” that users and search engines can understand and find valuable, you will rank higher. that has never changed, search is about achieving maximum results with the least amount of spends in the shortest time possible. do the basics and you will rank above average guaranteed SEO.

now given that said, links from other domain and high authority pages will probably remain one of the top 3 most important signals.

if your content is good enough for people and other websites to link to, it’s more like a vote you are getting for google to rank you better, and by increasing your domain authority you increase your overall ranking ability.
luckily for our SEO niche, the majority of Arabic websites have low da, so a bunch of good links were sufficient enough for us to rank “SEO agency Jordan” and a few more gave us the boost to compete for “Arabic SEO agency”.

Going for “Arabic SEO Agency”

now, after getting it all set, waiting the first three months to get out of the so-called  search sandbox – where your website sink in the algorithm for 3 months to evaluate its relevancy for what and where –

and after all foundational backlinks, competition and searcher’s intent analysis, it was clear what are the three main search terms related to Arabic SEO, therefore we need to generate useful content around:

Arabic SEO tools
Arabic SEO services
Arabic SEO company – agency

naturally, our website needs to prove for google that we are a trustworthy domain, that tackles the subject from all angels, enough information and pages to show expertise, while gaining media domains voting for us in the Arabic SEO discussions, gaining valuable mentions and enough boost to rank above the medium competition.

A little caveat in this regard, the image showed above was taken from an incognito browser, it should exclude any personal browsing biases, but results will vary depending on geographical locations and ads shown on-page. but it surely counts for something.

optimization is a never-ending process, but rankings are never guaranteed, it’s easier to maintain rankings overachieving new ones, so we will do our best to remain the top Arabic SEO agency, and we encourage our SEO competitors to step up their game and connect with us to share knowledge.

the whole SEO industry is based on sharing information, tools and tactics, Google is keeping their algorithmic secrets like a Coca-Cola recipe, and the only way to keep up with it is by spreading knowledge and digital awareness, and fighting web-spam together.

feel free to connect at info@mapsofarabia.com