Bilingual French-Arabic websites: RTL layout, SEO and mistakes to avoid

In Morocco many businesses have a French-only site, while part of their customers search and read in Arabic. A bilingual French-Arabic website widens the audience, builds trust and can rank for Arabic searches that are often less competitive. But Arabic is written right to left, with its own fonts and conventions: pasting a translation into the French layout produces a broken page and weak SEO.

Right-to-left (RTL) layout

• Reading direction: the whole page flips (dir="rtl"), including navigation, arrows, columns and alignment.
• Directional icons (arrows, chevrons) must be mirrored; logos and photos must not.
• Numbers and Latin names inside Arabic text must stay readable.
• Forms: fields, labels and error messages aligned right.
• Testing: every page checked in Arabic, on mobile and desktop.

Content: write, don't just translate

• Natural Arabic suited to your audience: Modern Standard Arabic for institutional pages, sometimes Moroccan expressions in sales messages.
• No raw machine translation: it shows and hurts credibility.
• Arabic keywords need their own research: people don't always search the literal translation. See finding your customers' keywords.

Multilingual SEO

• One URL per language (for example /ar/...), never a language switch without a URL change.
• hreflang tags linking each page to its equivalent.
• Titles and descriptions written in Arabic for Arabic pages.
• A visible language switcher that keeps the current page.
• A sitemap listing both versions.

Common mistakes

• An Arabic site that keeps the left-to-right layout.
• Unreviewed machine translation.
• The same URL for both languages.
• Images with French text in the Arabic version.
• Forms and confirmation emails left in French.

We build bilingual sites

We design websites in French, Arabic and English, with native RTL layout and SEO in each language. Have a French site to extend? Let's talk.