Arabic or English website for Dubai: which languages do you need?

Start with the searcher, not the country

Arabic is the official language of the Federation. That fact explains why Arabic matters, but it does not tell you what your customers type into Google. A company selling cloud services to multinational offices in Dubai may find that its buyers search and read in English. A clinic, a legal service or a retailer serving Emirati families may reach more people in Arabic.

Check your own data before deciding. Look at the languages your current visitors use in browser settings and in Search Console query reports, and ask your sales team which language buyers use on the phone and in emails. Then look at the results page. Search for your main service once in English and once in Arabic. If the Arabic results show real competitors, there is demand worth serving. If the page is empty or filled with unrelated results, an Arabic site may not be your first priority.

What Google needs from a bilingual site

Google recommends a separate URL for each language version of a page, for example /en/ and /ar/. Each version should point to the others with hreflang annotations, and each one must list itself as well. If two pages do not link to each other, Google ignores the tags. The reserved value x-default marks the fallback page for visitors whose language matches none of your versions. Arabic uses the language code ar, and a region such as AE can be added to it.

Avoid sending visitors automatically to one version based on a guess about their language or location. Google advises against redirecting users on that basis and against adapting content by IP address. Let people switch language with a visible link instead.

Translating only the menu and footer while the main content stays in English does not make an Arabic page. Google points out that such pages offer a poor experience when the bulk of the content remains in one language.

Right-to-left is a build decision

An Arabic page needs the right language and the right direction. The W3C advises setting dir="rtl" on the html element together with lang="ar", because direction is not implied by the language code. It also recommends logical CSS properties such as margin-inline-start instead of margin-left, so that the layout mirrors by itself.

This is far cheaper to do when the English site is first built. Retrofitting right-to-left support into a template full of fixed left and right values means reworking components one by one. If you plan an Arabic version later, ask your developer to use logical properties from the start.

Machine translation and thin pages

A quick machine translation of every English page is tempting. Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse lists producing many pages through automated transformations, including translating, where little value is provided to users. A single carefully reviewed service page is not that. Hundreds of unreviewed translated pages are exactly what the policy targets.

Have a native Arabic speaker with subject knowledge write or review the pages that matter: the core services, the contact page and the pages that win enquiries. Keywords in Arabic need their own research. A literal translation of an English keyword is often not the phrase people use.

A law may change the rules for Arabic content

A media report from May 2026 describes a planned Arabic language law, expected to come into force after further preparation. It mentions Arabic in public advertising campaigns and Arabic-speaking staff in customer-facing organisations. The report does not mention websites, and it says the law was still in development. Treat it as a signal to watch, not as a current rule, and check its status with legal counsel before building a compliance plan around it.