Google Ads keyword research in the UAE: Arabic, Arabizi and real volumes

A UAE keyword list has three pools, not two. English, Arabic script, and Arabic typed in Latin letters all behave as separate inventories inside Google Ads, because a keyword never matches a query in another language or another script. Keyword Planner sizes the English pool honestly, rounds the Arabic one into a bucket too wide to plan against, and shows close to nothing for the third. The only trustworthy Arabic volume figure you will ever see is the one your own account produces after a two to four week exact match probe.

Match type behaviour is a separate subject, covered in our guide to broad, phrase and exact match in Dubai. This page stays on the list and the numbers behind it.

Why keyword research breaks in the UAE

Most keyword research methods assume one language and one country. The UAE gives you neither. English carries a large share of commercial search in a heavily expatriate market, Arabic sits underneath it in a mix of written standard and Gulf spoken forms, and part of the Arabic demand arrives in Latin characters typed by people who would rather not switch keyboards.

Google Ads reconciles none of this for you. Close variant matching corrects misspellings, plurals, stems and accents inside a single language. It does not cross languages, and it does not treat a Latin transliteration as a variant of an Arabic word. Two scripts means two keyword sets, and in practice two campaigns, because the cost and conversion profiles diverge enough that one bid strategy blurs both.

Pool	Example	Where volume shows up
English	car rental dubai	Keyword Planner, reliably
Arabic script	تأجير سيارات دبي	Planner, split across spellings and rounded
Latin-script Arabic	ta2jeer sayarat dubai	Search terms report, if anywhere

Write the same offer three times, once per row, before you open a tool. The organic version of that split is structural rather than bid-level, which is why it belongs to search visibility work instead of the ads account.

How to read Keyword Planner numbers for the UAE

Treat every Planner figure as a twelve month national average of a group of keywords, not as the monthly demand available to your campaign in Dubai.

Four mechanics create the gap. Accounts without meaningful spend see bucketed ranges, so a keyword lands in 100 to 1K and you cannot tell 140 from 900. Planner has grouped close variants into a single row for years, so the figure covers spellings and forms you never asked about. The default location is the country, and Dubai is a fraction of it. The historical column is an annual average, which flattens the summer drop and the Ramadan swing into one line.

A keyword marked 100 searches a month delivers two clicks for a reason worth walking through. Say 100 searches nationally, of which roughly 60 sit inside your Dubai targeting. Your budget and ad rank give you a search impression share of 40 percent, so you appear on about 24 of them. At an 8 percent click through rate that is two clicks in a month. Nothing malfunctioned. The forecast was read as demand when it was an upper bound on a wider geography.

Build budgets from the Forecasts tab rather than the historical column. It is scoped to your location, language and bid, which is closer to the question you are asking. Then write the discount into the plan before anyone signs off on the raw number.

Why the Arabic rows look empty, and how to size them anyway

Planner is not lying about Arabic. It is counting one intent as five thin rows.

An Arabic query exists in several written forms because typing habits vary: hamza dropped, ta marbuta typed as ha, the definite article present or absent. Each variant becomes its own line with its own small number, and all of them land in the same bottom bucket. Demand that would read as significant if summed reads as noise when split. The orthographic side of that problem is covered in our guide to Arabic SEO and localization in the UAE; the ads consequence is that the export understates the pool.

Register adds to it. People write the standard form and speak the Gulf one, so the typed query and the voice query for one intent can be different strings, and Planner sees them as unrelated.

The reliable way to size Arabic demand is to buy a small amount of it. Build one exact match ad group with your best six Arabic keywords, cap it low, and run it for two to four weeks. Then read the keyword table: impressions divided by search impression share gives the eligible impressions in that geography and window. A keyword that delivered 340 impressions at a 22 percent impression share was eligible on roughly 1,550 searches. No third party tool can produce that number for your targeting.

Arabizi: the Latin-script pool nobody bids on

Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet, writes Arabic with Latin letters and digits chosen for visual resemblance: 3 for ع, 7 for ح, 2 for the hamza, 5 for خ. It is the default register in WhatsApp messages across the Gulf, and it leaks into search.

Two things get confused here. Loanwords like shawarma, kunafa or dishdasha are Latin-script strings that both Arabs and expats type, and Google treats them as English queries with unstable spellings. Full Arabizi, where the whole phrase is transliterated, is a separate case: an Arabic keyword will never match it, and an English keyword rarely will.

My read after working these accounts: Arabizi is real but thin in commercial search, and far smaller than the agency posts promising four figure percentage gains imply. It appears more in navigational and question shaped queries than in buying ones. Treat it as discovery and hygiene rather than a campaign. Pull the search terms report weekly for the first month, promote the Latin-script spellings that genuinely appear, and negative the ones that do not convert. Google withholds terms below its privacy threshold, so that report gives you the shape of the demand rather than all of it.

Do Dubai and Abu Dhabi need different keywords?

The intent is usually the same. The wording around it is not, and that is where the money leaks.

Place names carry several accepted spellings and searchers use all of them. Jumeirah and Jumeira. Umm Al Quwain and Umm Al Qaiwain. Ras Al Khaimah shortened to RAK by residents and written in full by everyone else. Those belong in the list as separate keywords, because close variants handle a misspelling more predictably than a legitimate alternative transliteration.

Location targeting matters more than the wording. Set campaigns to people in your targeted locations rather than the default that includes interest. Arabic keywords attract researchers across the region who are reading about Dubai from Riyadh or Cairo, and the interest option quietly invites them into a Dubai budget.

Split by emirate once the budget carries two clean data sets, then read the language mix of each campaign's search terms before deciding anything. In our accounts that mix shifts noticeably between Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Bilingual campaign structure and the negative layers

One campaign per language, one shared budget decision per language, and negatives in both scripts.

Language targeting is worth stating precisely, because it gets misread constantly. It governs who is eligible to see the ad, based on their Google interface language and the language of content they consume. Google does not translate your ads or your landing page. An English ad served against an Arabic keyword is a failure you built yourself, and it surfaces as a quality score problem long before it surfaces as a conversion problem.

Negatives need three layers. One shared list per language covering the usual waste: jobs, salary, free, courses, wholesale, DIY. One cross-script list of geography you never serve, because place names in Latin characters appear inside Arabic queries constantly. And campaign-level cross negatives, so the Arabic campaign stops bidding against the English one when a mixed query is eligible for both. Expect the Arabic list to grow faster in month one, since those search terms are less predictable.

The build, step by step

1. Write the offer in English, Arabic script and Arabizi before opening any tool.
2. Expand each pool separately. Autocomplete on google.ae with the Arabic interface is a better source for Arabic than any exported list.
3. Pull Planner in Forecast mode with the location set to the emirate, not the country.
4. Discount the forecast for impression share and click through rate before it reaches your budget model.
5. Launch the Arabic exact match probe on a small cap for two to four weeks.
6. Measure eligible impressions from impressions divided by search impression share.
7. Harvest Latin-script variants from the search terms report, then promote or negative them.
8. Rebuild the list from your own data at week five and drop the Planner numbers entirely.

If you would rather have that run on a live account, send us the account and the geography and we will come back with the gaps rather than a proposal.

Checking what competitors actually run here

Google's Ads Transparency Center filters an advertiser's ads by region and date, so you can see which Arabic creative a UAE competitor runs and for how long. It shows ads rather than keywords, which still answers whether a category has an Arabic bidder at all. Auction Insights covers the rest: a competitor who shows up in your English report and never in the Arabic one has made the same call most of this market makes, which is to ignore half the auction.

The bilingual accounts we run for brands including Fabiana Filippi, Rayhaan and DSQ Cosmetics reached the same place eventually. The Arabic side needed its own keywords and its own budget line, and it stopped looking like a rounding error once it stopped sharing a campaign with English. That side of the work sits under our paid search management.

Written by Artur Gall, CEO and founder of SkyLight Marketing, Dubai.

FAQ

Why does Keyword Planner show 100 searches a month when I only get a few clicks? The Planner figure is a twelve month national average, aggregated over close variants, and it counts searches rather than impressions available to you. A hundred national searches can leave roughly 60 inside a Dubai-only targeting, and at a 40 percent impression share and an 8 percent click through rate that turns into about 24 impressions and two clicks.

How do I find search volume for Arabic keywords when Planner shows nothing? Buy a sample. Run an exact match ad group with a low cap for two to four weeks, then divide impressions by search impression share to get eligible impressions for your exact targeting. It is the only figure scoped to your geography, your language setting and your dates.

Should I treat transliterated Arabic as a separate keyword set? Yes, because Google will not connect it to anything else. A Latin-script transliteration is neither an English word nor a match for the Arabic keyword. Add only the spellings that appear in your search terms report rather than generating them speculatively.

What CPC should I expect on Arabic keywords in Dubai? In our accounts, Arabic-script terms usually clear below the English equivalent for the same product, because fewer advertisers keep an Arabic keyword list at all. The auction is thinner, so one new bidder moves the price further than it would in English. Treat your English band as the ceiling and check it weekly.

Do Dubai and Abu Dhabi need different keyword lists? The core terms are the same. What changes is the place-name vocabulary and the language mix of the people searching. Split the campaigns when the budget supports two clean data sets, and set targeting to presence rather than presence or interest in both.

How many negative keywords does a bilingual campaign need? There is no target number. Run one shared list per language, one cross-script list for geography you do not serve, and cross negatives between the two campaigns. The count is an output of your review cadence.