Arabic and bilingual websites, designed rather than mirrored

It depends on who buys from you. Arabic is the official language of the UAE, and government bodies, Emirati families and buyers from across the Gulf often expect to read in it. If your customers are mostly international companies, English alone may be enough.

If you are unsure, look at the enquiries you already receive and the language your sales team answers the phone in.

Often, yes. It depends on how the site was built. If spacing and alignment were coded for left-to-right only, each template has to be reworked, and that can cost more than the Arabic design itself.

We start with a short audit and tell you whether to extend the current site or rebuild it.

You can, and readers will notice. Machine translation usually gets the meaning roughly right and the tone wrong. It can mistranslate brand terms and produce sentences no Arabic writer would choose.

It has a place as a first draft for long reference content, provided an Arabic editor reviews every page before it is published. Headlines, service pages and anything a buyer decides on should be written.

Each page carries hreflang tags that list its counterpart in the other language, and the page code declares its own language and direction. Google uses these signals to match the version to the searcher.

This also answers a common worry. Google does not treat a translated page as a duplicate of the original. For the wider search set-up, see SEO and performance.

Most business websites in the UAE use Western digits, 0 to 9, in both languages. Buyers are used to them, and prices and phone numbers stay consistent across the two versions.

Whichever you choose, numbers still run left to right inside Arabic text. Phone numbers need particular care, because a browser can reorder the groups of digits unless the code tells it not to.