The Arabic Web: Numbers and Facts

The Middle East and North Africa have around 65 million web users nowadays, showing that Arabic is now the 7^th most spoken language in the digital sphere. Lee Mancini who has 10 years of experience within the Middle East, from Sekari was happy to provide us with insights into the size and scope of this market taking culture, language and region into account to shape effective SEO tactics.

General statistics

Some interesting statistics on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

Within the last 2 years internet penetration has grown on average by 228%
51% of the Saudi Arabian population is under 21 years old and a further 37% are under 14 years
The largest muslim populations can be found in Indonesia (203 million), Pakistan (174 million) and India (161 million)
Google searches have now reached the 100 million count, the global count on the other hand is 4 billion
13% of all Google searches within MENA are now conducted through mobile devices
In Saudi Arabia alone mobile search is growing at 200%
However, we must keep in mind the whole of the Arabic speaking region not just the Middle East
There are currently 280 million Arabic speakers in the world
45.9 million internet users search in Arabic
Whilst 9 million search in Arabic outside the MENA region
Still Arabic online content constitutes only 1.5% of global totals

Social Statistics and Trends

80% of internet users in MENA spend more than an hour each day updating their social networking channel
Facebook is the most popular website in MENA followed by Maktoob, and Wikipedia
The average online user’s age is 25 years, showing a rather young society of online users
Youtube has now reached 100 million video playbacks in contrast to 2.5 billion globally
Within Egypt the most searched for word was ‘games’ (written in Arabic), then ‘Facebook’ followed by ‘pictures’ (written in Arabic again)
KSA, YouTube (spelled in Arabic) was the most searched for
Interestingly 60% of Saudi Facebook users are using the social network in Arabic
Whilst 84% of Facebook users in Maghreb use it in French
89% of United Arabic Emirates Facebook users use Facebook in English
Alone in December 2010, 1.1 million people joined Facebook
Whilst nowadays 36000 new Facebook users sign-up each day within the MENA region
44% of Facebook users login at least once a day
75% login at least once a month

Search in the Middle East

Google now has domains for 15 Arab countries featuring integrated Arabic language options for the search interface and searches (e.g google.ae)
Egypt is the second country in terms of the number of search queries after Saudi Arabia
The United Arabic Emirates are the third fastest growing country in regard to search queries

With so much change and new technologies available to the Arab population it does not come as a surprise that the increase in internet connectivity has resulted in a type of search revolution, and I would now like to take a look at the most searched for words as a result of that:

The most searched for words were tyrant, dictator and oppressor
Topics relating to the 25^th January uprising came at the top of the list in terms of search queries
As a result the revolution of the 25^th of January and Tahrir Square were the top searched
However, generally speaking the most searched for words are: job vacancies, uprisings in the Arabic countries, as well as online selling and buying

Not all Arabic!

Keep in mind though that it’s not all in Arabic

539 million people living in MENA are English speaking
UAE 80% of the search volume is in English
Whilst 66% of MENA searches are conducted in English
54% of Google searches in MENA are now made in Arabic, 34% in English, 8% in French
70%-80% of web users search in Arabic in Egypt and Saudi Arabia
French is still widely spoken and altogether accounts for 73 million in MENA (Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, etc.)

Mobile more important than Desktop

Mobile has the potential to surpass desktop

UAE and Saudi have more mobiles per capita than any other country
The average mobile penetration rate is 96% whilst globally it is 82%, with 50% of all mobile traffic coming from Symbian devices

Break up of the region

The region is broken up into many small countries with relatively small search volumes in each country. In addition to that the search volume is broken down into 2-3 languages namely English, Arabic and French. Meaning that it’s difficult to justify a localized website for every country in every language. However, Google requires local country indicators for all 15 country search engines in the region.

So how can we influence local visibility?

Google still prefers cc TLDs, which provide the most obvious signals about the audience a site is targeting. However in some countries such as Saudi it is difficult to apply for an official cc TLD’s. Other cues include the following:

Where the site is hosted ( in many cases sites prefer to host outside the region)
Local links pointing to site
What language the website is hosted in (only effectual with Arabic search but not English in various regions)
Local address information
Google webmaster tools geo-targeting setting
However many options do exist whereas cc LTDs usually works best, but sub domains and sub directories can be effective too
What works in Europe might not necessarily work in the Middle East
It’s crucial to provide local country content (whether it is cc LTD, sub-domain or a sub-directory for both English and Arabic

Considerations

What digital marketers wanting to operate within the MENA region have to consider

Be in touch with local marketing managers as they will be able to shed light into the types of languages spoken, keywords and your target audience’s search patterns
Do your keyword research, keeping your target audience in mind, behavior is varies across countries and languages
In Arabic there are often various words for the same meaning
Know your translator: Egyptian Arabic is different to other forms of Arabic
Local Language and English speaking: most Arabic countries teach American English at school

This clearly indicates that a lot of things will change in the years to come offering digital marketers to enter the ever growing Arabic web.

Image source: Guardian