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// Case Study · United Arab Emirates

BAT Velo (British American Tobacco)

International SEO · UAE Market Launch

8,300
Organic clicks earnedSix months from a zero baseline
  • // MarketUnited Arab Emirates
  • // Duration6 months
  • // TaglineDual-language launch into a market with no existing demand, against Noon.com and Carrefour from day zero.
// 019.6Average ranking positionAcross target keyword set
// 022Languages live in parallelArabic + English
// 036 moFrom signed contract to ranked at scale

// 01. The Problem

What was actually wrong

Launch a category nobody in the market is searching for yet.

BAT Velo needed to enter the UAE market in two languages simultaneously, Arabic and English, for a category where buyer search demand barely existed yet. Most competitors in the broader retail space (Noon.com, Carrefour) were household names with budgets and indexed estates running into the millions of pages. BAT Velo had a launch deadline.

// 02. The Stakes

Every month of underperformance was a month of paid acquisition having to do all the work, at UAE CPCs that don't forgive low conversion. International dual-language SEO is the kind of project where most agencies need 12 months and a translation team before they ship anything. BAT Velo needed real organic visibility inside six.

// 03. What We Did

The mistake most international SEO programmes make is translating the English content into Arabic and calling it done. That doesn't work because the buying searches in Arabic aren't translations of the English ones, they're different searches, asked in different ways, by buyers in different mental modes. We mapped each language's buyer journey separately, built each as a distinct ranked estate, and let the brand authority compound across both.

  1. 01

    Built two parallel demand maps

    Arabic-language buyer searches mapped in Arabic, by Arabic-speaking researchers. English the same way. Translation came last, not first.

  2. 02

    Shipped category-defining content in both languages

    Where buyer demand barely existed yet, we created the language buyers would use to express it, building the search demand alongside the pages that capture it.

  3. 03

    Geo-targeted technical foundations

    Hreflang, country-specific structured data, and local Knowledge Graph signals so Google served the right page to the right buyer in the right language.

  4. 04

    Earned regional editorial coverage

    Coverage in UAE-specific publications that AI engines and Google both treat as primary sources for the regional market.

// 04. The Outcome

Six months after kickoff, BAT Velo was ranking at an average position of 9.6 across the target keyword set in both Arabic and English. 8,300 organic clicks delivered against a baseline of zero, not from a translation programme, but from two purpose-built ranked estates running in parallel.

8,300Organic clicks earned
Six months in, a brand-new domain was showing up alongside Noon and Carrefour in Google. That's not supposed to happen.
— British American Tobacco, UAE

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