SEO FAQ — what Egyptian businesses actually ask us

1. How long does SEO actually take for a site targeting Egypt?

   From the diagnosis files we open every month, the pattern is consistent: indexing and impression movement on Search Console inside 4–8 weeks, position gains on long-tail Egyptian queries between months 3 and 5, and competitive head terms ("شقق للبيع التجمع الخامس", "seo company egypt", "عيادة أسنان مدينة نصر") between months 6 and 9. Real-estate SERPs in New Cairo and the Administrative Capital are the slowest because aqarmap.com and propertyfinder.eg occupy 6–8 of the top 10 slots; clinics and B2B move faster because the SERP is fragmented. Anyone promising 30-day rankings is selling against a SERP they haven't read.

2. What does the diagnosis file actually contain before you propose any work?

   We don't quote scope before we read the SERP. Each diagnosis covers six layers: (1) crawl + indexability — robots, sitemaps, canonical drift, duplicate Arabic/English URLs without hreflang; (2) on-page intent match against the live Egyptian SERP for each target query; (3) keyword cluster gap — what your site can rank for that you currently don't address; (4) local visibility — Google Business Profile completeness, NAP consistency across Yellow.com.eg / Yallakora-style citations, Maps pack eligibility; (5) Core Web Vitals on a real Egyptian 4G connection (LCP, INP, CLS field data when available); (6) link profile risk — toxic links, lost referring domains, anchor distribution. The file lands as a PDF before any commercial conversation.

3. How do you handle Arabic search behaviour — is it just translated content?

   No. Translation is the one thing that breaks Arabic SEO. Egyptians search in three parallel systems on the same device: Modern Standard Arabic ("شركة سيو في مصر"), Egyptian dialect ("شركة بتعمل سيو"), and Franco-Arabic / Arabizi ("shar2et seo masr", "3eyada asnan"). Google treats these as three different demand pools. We build keyword clusters that map all three, decide which variant a page should target based on intent and SERP composition, and write the H1 + body in that variant. We also fix the silent killer most Egyptian sites have: Arabic and English versions sharing one canonical, or hreflang missing the `ar-EG` / `en-EG` pair — which collapses both into one ranking signal.

4. What technical SEO issues do you most often find on Egyptian websites?

   After auditing dozens of sites this year, the same eight blockers recur: render-blocking third-party scripts (Tawk.to, Bitrix24 chat, unoptimised GTM containers) pushing LCP past 4s on 4G; duplicate Arabic/English URL pairs without hreflang; canonical tags pointing to the staging subdomain; sitemaps still listing /wp-admin or expired campaign URLs; product pages with empty `<title>` inherited from a Shopify or WooCommerce theme; Arabic slugs URL-encoded twice (`%25D8%25B4`); JSON-LD schema for Organization but nothing for Product / LocalBusiness / Article; and internal linking concentrated in the footer instead of contextual body links. We score each by impact on indexable surface area, not by severity badge colour.

5. How is your keyword research different from an exported Ahrefs spreadsheet?

   An exported list is a research input, not a deliverable. We pull seed terms from Ahrefs, Semrush and Search Console, then run them through three filters most exports skip: SERP-feature reality (does the top 10 even contain a transactional page, or is it all aqarmap + youm7 news?), Arabic variant mapping (one English term often splits into 3–5 Arabic intents), and locality ("دكتور أسنان" in Maadi vs. Sheikh Zayed produces different SERPs and different competitors). The output is an architecture document — clusters tied to specific URLs on your site, with the SERP feature each page must win (featured snippet, People Also Ask, local pack, image carousel) — not a 5,000-row CSV.

6. Do you do link building, and how do you keep it safe for Egyptian sites?

   Yes, but only after on-page and technical work can absorb the authority — pushing links into a site with broken canonicals just amplifies the wrong URLs. Our link work is a mix of digital PR placements in Egyptian publications (Youm7, Masrawy, Cairo Scene, Identity, regional industry titles), Arabic resource pages, partnership and citation work for local SEO, and content assets that earn links naturally (datasets, market intelligence reports, original SERP analyses). We don't buy bulk links, we don't use PBNs, and we don't touch the comment-spam networks still being sold inside Cairo Facebook groups — every Egyptian site we've audited that bought from them carries a manual-action risk we then have to disavow.

7. Can you actually move Google Maps and the local pack in Egyptian cities?

   Yes, when the business has a real address and reviews to work with. Local pack work in Cairo and Alexandria is mostly: Google Business Profile category and service alignment with the queries we want to win, NAP consistency across Yellow.com.eg / Daleel Misr / Foursquare / Apple Maps, primary category vs. additional category strategy (one wrong primary category demotes you below competitors who picked correctly), Arabic + English business name handling without keyword stuffing the name field (which triggers a suspension), review velocity from real customers with response in the same language, and geo-tagged photos updated monthly. For multi-branch businesses (clinics, restaurants, retail) we build one profile per branch with unique landing pages — not one profile pointing at a generic homepage.

8. What does a monthly report from you actually look like?

   Three sections, no fluff. (1) Movement — keyword position changes by cluster (not by individual keyword), organic clicks and impressions from Search Console, conversions from organic where tracking is wired up, and indexed-vs-crawled page count. (2) Health — Core Web Vitals trend, new technical issues opened, issues closed, and any indexing anomalies. (3) Work shipped — every page edited, every piece of content published, every link earned, every technical fix merged, with the Search Console screenshot or before/after evidence. The report is a written read-out, not a dashboard screenshot dump. If a month underperformed, the report says so and explains why before recommending the next move.

9. Do you guarantee first-page rankings?

   No, and any agency in Egypt that does is either misleading you or planning to rank you for a query nobody actually searches. Google's own Webmaster Guidelines explicitly say no third party can guarantee a position, because the ranking algorithm is owned by Google and changes weekly. What we do guarantee is process: a written diagnosis before scope, monthly reporting that shows actual work and actual movement, no black-hat shortcuts that risk a manual action, and the ability to walk away with all your content, schema, and link assets if the engagement ends.

10. How do you handle ecommerce SEO for stores selling in Egypt?

    Ecommerce SEO in Egypt has three failure modes we fix first: empty or templated product titles and meta descriptions inherited from the theme; category pages with thin copy that lose to Jumia, Noon and Amazon.eg on every commercial query; and faceted navigation creating thousands of crawlable URLs (`?color=red&size=L&sort=price`) that dilute crawl budget. We rebuild category page copy with intent-matched content, add Product and BreadcrumbList schema, fix faceted URLs with canonical + robots rules, and identify the 20% of products driving 80% of organic potential so content effort goes where it actually moves revenue. Arabic product names need slug normalisation — `/product/شاشة-سامسونج` should not double-encode to `%25D8%25B4`.

Have a question we didn't cover? Open a diagnosis file and we'll answer it inside your audit. Arabic version: الأسئلة الشائعة بالعربي.