Who searches in which language
Morocco's search habits mix languages. As a rule of thumb from the searches we see:
- French leads searches for business services, professional services, B2B and most technical subjects.
- Arabic and Darija are more common in everyday consumer searches. Darija is often typed in Latin letters, sometimes with numbers standing for Arabic sounds.
- English matters for tourism, for companies selling abroad, for international staff and, increasingly, for younger professionals.
These are tendencies, not rules. The searches that matter for your business are the ones your own customers type.
Find out from your own data
Open the Performance report in Search Console and read the list of queries. The language of each search is visible at a glance. On our own site, for example, the list includes "seo morocco" in English, "agence seo maroc" in French and "سيو المغرب" in Arabic. That is why our site has English and French versions and a structure that leaves room for more.
If your site is new and Search Console is empty, type your main service into Google in each language and look at what the suggestions and the results show.
Research each language separately
Translation is where most multilingual sites lose. People do not search the literal translation of an English phrase. In French SEO, for instance, people say "SEO on-page" and "netlinking", not "SEO sur la page" or "création de liens". A page built around the translated term ranks for a search nobody makes.
So for each language, start again from the customer's words: Google's suggestions, the "People also ask" questions, and the phrases your team hears on the phone. Then write the page for those.
How to structure the site
- One address per language, usually a folder: example.ma/ for the main language, example.ma/fr/ or example.ma/ar/ for the others.
- hreflang tags on every page naming its versions in the other languages, and an x-default for everyone else, as Google documents.
- A language switch that leads to the same page in the other language, not to the other home page.
- Right-to-left layout for Arabic pages, with the
dir="rtl"attribute and a design tested in that direction. - No automatic redirection by browser language. Let people choose, and let Google crawl every version.
Common mistakes
- One URL for all languages, switched by a cookie, so Google only sees one version.
- Automatic translation plugins that publish every page in another language without review.
- hreflang tags that point one way only, which Google ignores.
- Titles and descriptions copied from the main language.
Where to start
Start with the language that brings most of your customers today and make it excellent. Add a second language page by page, beginning with the pages that sell, rather than translating the whole site at once.
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