Mastering Market-Specific SEO: Localized Keyword Research for Saudi Arabian Hospitality Industry

Our customer is in the hospitality and tourism industry. They contacted us looking for help with localized keywords that combine strong search volume with keyword intent and difficulty, which helps them to stand out in the market.

The target language for the project was Arabic for Saudi Arabia.

Keyword research is a specialized service which requires local knowledge and linguistic prowess, along with technical expertise of SEO tools and strategies. For this project, we enlisted our top local linguist and our internal SEO experts.

Requirements

This was the first request of this kind received from a client who has been giving us regular translation and machine translation projects.
The scope was to conduct keyword research for the Saudi Arabian market for the given content, and to find the primary plus two secondary keywords per article.
The keywords were to be relevant Arabic search terms, not just English keywords translated into Arabic.
We were also asked to provide the search volume and keyword difficulty for each term.

The client gave us additional pointers:

Avoid generic keywords such as “hotel in [location]” as it's too competitive and extremely hard to rank for.
Avoid negative keywords such as “cheap” or “crowded”, unless specified in the questionnaire by the client that they want to target these keywords.
The listed keywords need to be added to the optimized content, either in the article itself, the meta title or meta description.
Avoid keyword stuffing! Look for unique keywords.

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One of the main challenges with a project like this is finding high-volume keywords that are specific to a region and language. Search volumes are naturally low, so the linguist and SEO team need to be particularly resourceful.
The customer expected to have a very specific keyword which will help them to be the best in the market, even though some of the initial suggestions yielded very poor results.
The tools that were initially used to gauge results were giving conflicting feedback, so more accurate and relevant processes were needed.

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When satisfactory results were not being found, the matter was escalated and the full force of the internal SEO team was brought into help with this project.
After evaluating the initial results, the SEO experts discussed the next strategy and concluded that a different tool was needed to produce a result that met the customer's expectation.
These results, along with correct values for volume a difficulty, were delivered to the client.
Upon request, the SEO experts were able to produce appropriate variants of the Keywords.

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The client received a list of transactional keywords that are searched for by actual customers who are likely to go on to purchase, rather than general informational keywords. This means that the final results delivered had more relevance to the region.
Once we had worked with the client to produce quality results, the customer asked us to add more variations outside the initial project scope.

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