The words Saudi Arabia actually types.

Saudi Arabia searches for who to hire, not what to build

Two Arabic phrases carry almost all of the commercial search demand in this category. شركة تسويق, meaning marketing company, gets 3,600 searches a month in Saudi Arabia. وكالة تسويق, marketing agency, gets 2,900. Both are tagged Commercial intent, which means the person typing is close to spending money.

Now the other side. قسم التسويق, marketing department, gets 210. بناء قسم التسويق, building a marketing department, gets zero. هيكل قسم التسويق, marketing department structure, gets zero.

That gap is not a gap in demand. Companies in this market spend on marketing constantly, and Saudi digital ad spend is forecast at 4.68 billion dollars this year. The gap is in language. The market has a well-worn phrase for renting marketing and no phrase at all for owning it.

Every keyword tool gives you four numbers, and three of them get misread

Before any of the tables below mean anything, the four columns need definitions. Most keyword arguments are really definition arguments in disguise.

Volume is the number everyone quotes and the softest of the four. Cost per click is the number almost nobody quotes and the hardest. An advertiser paying 8.97 dollars a click for مدير تسويق, marketing manager, in Saudi Arabia is placing a real bet with real money. That bet is evidence. A volume estimate is a model.

The whole country is online, and one company decides what it finds

Saudi Arabia is not a market where you have to argue for digital. That argument closed years ago.

Three Saudi government figures and one independent tracker say the same thing: this is a fully connected, mobile-first, Google-dominated market. If someone in your buying market is going to research a decision, they research it on a phone, on Google, in the next few minutes.

Which makes the question of what they type into that box a real business question, not a technical one. It is the closest thing you have to a transcript of what your market is thinking about at the moment it decides to act.

How keyword lists actually get built, and why they fail

Someone opens the tool. They type the name of what the company sells. The tool returns a list. They sort it by volume, highest first. They take the top twenty, hand them to whoever writes, and ask for one article per keyword. Three months later the traffic report shows a line that has not moved, and the conclusion in the room is that SEO does not work in this market.

Every step there is reasonable. The sequence is what fails. Sorting by volume means you optimised for the number the tool is least confident about. And before any of it, did anyone ask whether the people behind that number can buy something from you?

There is a second version of the same mistake, and it is the one that catches founders. You type your own product name. If you sell a book called Building Marketing Department, you type "building a marketing department". The tool says 10 searches a month in the United States, zero in Saudi Arabia. You conclude nobody wants this. What actually happened is that you searched for your answer instead of their question.

The Arabic map, sorted by money rather than by size

This is the full Arabic picture for Saudi Arabia. Read the cost per click column alongside the volume column, because the two disagree more often than you would expect.

One row does not belong with the others. مدير تسويق sits at 260 searches, which is small, and at 8.97 dollars a click, which is the highest price in the entire Arabic set. Advertisers are paying more than three times the marketing company rate to reach 260 people. They are paying it because those 260 people are about to make a hiring decision.

In English, this market only searches for one thing

The English side of Saudi search is almost entirely geographic and almost entirely about hiring a vendor. The concept keywords are close to empty.

Look at the last four rows and then look at the first six. Every term that describes hiring an outside company has volume and a price attached. Every term that describes the decision that comes before that hire has almost no volume and, in three of the last four rows, a cost per click of zero. No advertiser is bidding on the comparison. They are all bidding on the transaction that follows it.

One row is worth stopping on. The bare phrase "marketing department" in Saudi English gets 50 searches a month, and advertisers pay 22.97 dollars a click for them. That is nearly three times the price of a click on "marketing agency riyadh", which carries 14 times the volume. Somebody has worked out that the fifty people typing those two words are worth far more than the seven hundred looking for a vendor.

The two languages of this market do different jobs

Put the same idea side by side in both languages and the pattern holds across the set.

Arabic wins volume on every concept row, by about 3 to 1 on the agency terms and 4 to 1 on the department itself. English wins price on the rows where a company, rather than a student or a curious employee, is doing the typing. That is not a coincidence about language. It is a fact about who types in which language. Arabic search here includes everyone. English search here filters down to corporate buyers, consultants and expatriate managers, and advertisers price it accordingly.

This has a direct consequence for anyone choosing which language to publish in first. If you want reach, publish Arabic. If you want the twelve people at a Riyadh holding company who are about to sign something, publish English and accept the tiny numbers.

The phrases that return nothing, and the one that proves why

Not low. Nothing. Every phrase below returned a search volume of zero for Saudi Arabia, with an empty monthly history behind it.

And the English side of the same list, also zero in Saudi Arabia: first marketing hire, marketing agency vs in-house team, when to hire a marketing agency, marketing maturity assessment, marketing audit, marketing metrics for CEOs, marketing consultant saudi arabia.

Read that second list again. Marketing audit, zero. Marketing maturity assessment, zero. Marketing consultant Saudi Arabia, zero. Those are three of the most commonly sold consulting services in this market, and not one of them is a phrase anyone types. The services sell. The words do not travel. A service can sell well and still have no search vocabulary. Nobody searched for a smartphone in 2006 either.

Here is the cleanest evidence in the whole study that these zeros are about vocabulary rather than interest. مؤشرات الأداء, meaning KPIs, gets 1,000 Saudi searches a month. مؤشرات الأداء التسويقية, meaning marketing KPIs, gets zero. Same country. Same month. Same tool. The second phrase is the first phrase with the word "marketing" attached, and attaching it takes the number from 1,000 to nothing.

The concept of measuring performance is fully established in Saudi business. A thousand people a month go looking for it. The idea that marketing is one of the things you measure has not attached itself to that concept yet. It has no phrase, so it produces no search, so it looks like it does not exist.

Anyone who has sat in a Saudi quarterly review already knows this without the data. Finance has numbers. Operations has numbers. Sales has a target on a wall. Marketing has a deck of screenshots and a sentence about brand awareness. The search data is just that meeting, written down at national scale. They measure everything. They have not been taught that marketing is one of the things.

The world does not search for this either. It searches for a person.

The Saudi numbers look small. Is the topic bigger somewhere else? It is, but not in the way you would guess.

Four keywords carry 12,500 of the 13,370 monthly searches in that table. The ten that describe the actual work of building a department carry 870 between them, less than a quarter of what fractional cmo carries on its own. And the phrase "how to build a marketing department" gets 10 searches a month in the largest English-speaking market on earth, at a cost per click of zero.

What the world does search for is the person. The fractional CMO cluster runs to 6,500 searches a month, and the buying terms inside it carry the highest prices in this entire study: 40.17 dollars a click for "hire fractional cmo", 33.69 for "hire a fractional cmo".

Who actually owns these results

Assumption going in: the big Arabic content mills own these pages. Mawdoo3, Edarabia, Mostaql, Harmash, Annajah. The live results say otherwise. Mawdoo3 appeared once across five Arabic search pages, at position 16, for one estimated visit. Edarabia, hubspot-ar, Mostaql, Harmash and Annajah appeared zero times. And 13 of the 21 organic results for قسم التسويق are Saudi university domains ending .edu.sa.

The winners are stranger than the assumption. Marketing department searches return university course pages. Marketing manager searches return job description templates. Marketing plan searches return Scribd uploads and LinkedIn posts.

The weakest page in the set is الهيكل التنظيمي لقسم التسويق, marketing department organisational structure. Every result on it returned zero estimated clicks. The top three results have domain authority of 10, 10 and 54. A site with an authority score of 4 ranks on page two. Four of the results are not web pages at all: a Syrian PDF, an Algerian academic journal, an Iraqi Word document and a Scribd upload.

Two small sites are beating large ones on real traffic. technatech.com, authority 15, takes 14 estimated visits at position 4 on خطة تسويقية, ahead of Canva at authority 93. ezdig.me, authority 18, takes 14 visits at position 3 on مهام مدير التسويق, ahead of mawdoo3 at authority 54.

Same exercise in English. The result is the same shape and slightly more absurd.

theorgchart.com is a small site with an authority score of 33 and it sits above Gartner, Indeed and Pinterest. One of its top pages earns 3,459 monthly visits with zero backlinks and zero referring domains. Six of its eight best pages have one backlink or none. Meanwhile a Scribd copy of HubSpot's own article outranks HubSpot.

Two more findings from these pages. On the Saudi English search for "marketing department structure" there is not a single Saudi or Gulf result at any position, despite the Saudi location setting. And on "marketing consultant saudi arabia", every result returned zero estimated clicks, and five of them are job boards. The only human being on that page is one LinkedIn profile ranking on LinkedIn's authority, not their own. An entire commercial keyword in this country, and the search page is job listings and a directory.

Three ways to get this wrong

There are two obvious failure modes here, opposite in direction, and a third that sits on top of both and is newer than either.

One. Chasing the 3,600 gets you traffic that cannot buy from you

شركة تسويق carries 3,600 searches a month at a difficulty of 15. That is the most attractive looking number in this entire study, and it is a trap for anyone selling anything other than agency services.

The intent tag on it reads Commercial, and the search results confirm it: agency homepages, directories, Clutch listings. The person typing it has already decided what they are buying. They are not asking whether to build a department. They are comparing vendors, and they want a price and a portfolio.

You can rank for that phrase. Difficulty 15 is genuinely low, and on the related Saudi English term the winner is digitect.com at authority 27, taking 73 estimated visits, more than the rest of the page combined. What you cannot do is convert that visitor into a person who buys a book about internal capability, because you have interrupted a purchase already in progress with a suggestion that they do something harder instead.

Two. Chasing your own title gets you a page nobody asks for

The opposite mistake, and the one that catches people with a strong point of view. You have a framework. You have a name for it. You target the name. "How to build a marketing department" gets 10 United States searches a month at a cost per click of zero. بناء قسم التسويق gets zero in Saudi Arabia. And the entire first page of Google for that English phrase moves about 17 estimated visits a month across every site on it.

That last number deserves a second look. HubSpot ranks tenth on that page and earns one visit. You could win the page outright tomorrow and the prize would be a handful of visitors.

Worse, the content index behind it is thin enough to be visibly abandoned. Only ten pages exist in the tool's content database for "marketing department structure", and their combined social shares total zero. Four of the ten are PDF spam sitting on hijacked subdomains, including a Brazilian municipal government domain and a seminary, all serving the same file. When spam is your main competition, the prize is usually not worth the fight. Owning a word nobody types is just owning a word.

Three. The machine answers exactly the words this category is made of

There is a newer problem sitting on top of both failures, and it hits low volume informational keywords hardest. Which is to say, it hits this entire category.

Look at the first number against the keyword tables above. Almost every keyword in this study sits under 1,000 monthly searches. The words that describe building a marketing department are precisely the words a machine now answers before anyone reaches a website.

Google launched AI Mode in Arabic in October 2025, so this is not a purely English problem for much longer. One caveat worth stating plainly: every click study quoted above measured United States behaviour. None of them measured Saudi Arabia or Arabic results. Google holds 95.81% of Saudi search, which makes the extrapolation reasonable, and reasonable is not the same as measured.

Zero volume is not zero demand. It is zero vocabulary.

Three facts from everything above, placed next to each other.

A market cannot spend 4.68 billion dollars on something it has no interest in. The money moves. The searches for the underlying decision do not exist. Both are true, and the only explanation that survives both is that the market is acting without a shared language for what it is doing.

This changes what a keyword list is for. A keyword with volume is a demand you can capture. A keyword with zero volume and a real underlying problem is a demand you have to name before you can capture it. The first is a channel decision. The second is a positioning decision, and it takes years rather than quarters. You cannot rank for a phrase your market has not learned to say. You can teach it the phrase.

The incumbent left, and nobody took the space

There is a specific reason this is a better moment to publish Arabic business content than any of the last ten years. The Arabic content site everyone assumes owns this space lost 82% of its traffic.

That is a fall of roughly 82% in two years, with a cliff between December 2025 and January 2026. Mawdoo3 still holds 1.46 million ranking keywords and an authority score of 54, and its top ten pages are now prayers, jokes and riddles. Whatever it was, it is no longer the Arabic business answer engine.

Nothing has replaced it. On the five Arabic pages examined in this study, the space it vacated was filled by university course listings, job description templates, Scribd uploads and forum threads. Not by a competitor. By whatever was nearby.

Four doors into the same building

Given all of the above, there are exactly four ways into this market through search. They are not equally good and they do not pay on the same schedule, which is the point of ranking them.

Every figure in this table is the sum of named keywords from the Arabic and English tables above, plus the United Arab Emirates figures given below. Door one Arabic is شركة تسويق plus وكالة تسويق. Door one English is the six agency-finding terms. Door two Arabic is خطة تسويقية plus نموذج خطة تسويقية; its English figure is marketing plan template in Saudi plus the Emirates. Door three Arabic is مدير تسويق plus مهام مدير التسويق plus وصف وظيفي مدير تسويق. Door four Arabic is قسم التسويق plus مهام قسم التسويق.

Most brands pick door one, get the traffic, fail to convert it, and quit. A few pick door four, write brilliant essays about a phrase nobody types, and quit for the opposite reason. The two that actually work are doors two and three, and almost nobody in this market is standing at either.

Door one pays fast and converts badly. Door two does the opposite.

Door one, the hire. شركة تسويق at 3,600, وكالة تسويق at 2,900, marketing agency riyadh at 720 with a cost per click of 8.04 dollars. Difficulty scores of 15, 13 and 28. These are winnable and they are the wrong audience for anything except agency services.

There is one honest use for this door if you are not an agency. Write the comparison page that this market has never written: what a Riyadh agency actually costs against what a two-person internal team actually costs, in riyals, with the Saudization rules included. You will capture people at the exact moment they are about to spend, and you will be the only page on the internet that gives them a second option. Accept that most of them will still hire the agency. Some will remember who told them the truth. That page already exists on this site: marketing agency or in-house team.

Door two, the document. خطة تسويقية at 260 with a Commercial intent tag and a cost per click of 2.42 dollars, نموذج خطة تسويقية at 50 with difficulty 8, marketing plan template at 70 in Saudi and 140 in the Emirates, tagged Commercial in both markets. This is the smallest cluster with the clearest buying signal in the entire Arabic set. Someone downloading a marketing plan template has admitted, in private, that they do not have one.

The title door is the one the money is already pointing at

Door three, the title. مدير تسويق, 260 searches, 8.97 dollars a click, Commercial intent, difficulty 13. وصف وظيفي مدير تسويق, 10 searches. مهام مدير التسويق, 40 searches. marketing manager job description, 40 in Saudi and 210 in the Emirates at 2.23 dollars a click.

Small numbers, and the highest advertiser prices in the Arabic set. Somebody is paying nine dollars a click to reach a person thinking about a marketing manager. That person is either about to write a job description or about to sign an offer letter, which makes them the single most valuable reader in this entire keyword map for anyone selling a system for building a department. They have already decided to build rather than rent. They just do not know what to hire for yet. If that is you, start with who to hire first.

There is a regulatory reason this door widens in 2026. From 19 January 2026, a 60% Saudization rate applies to marketing roles including marketing managers, advertising and PR specialists, graphic designers and photographers, for any organisation with three or more people in the function, with a minimum salary of 5,500 riyals a month for a Saudi national to count toward it. Every company crossing that third marketing hire now has a compliance question attached to an org chart question. The figures here come from published legal summaries of the ministry's decision rather than from the decree text; confirm the current wording with MHRSD before you act on it.

Door four, the vocabulary. قسم التسويق at 210 with a cost per click of zero, and everything below it at zero. Nobody will pay you for this door for a long time. It is where the category name gets decided, and category names get decided by whoever writes the definition that other people start quoting.

What to publish, in what order, and what to measure

Sequence matters more than the list. This order assumes a site starting from zero authority, which is where the case study site in this report starts.

Notice what is not in the table. No blog about digital marketing trends. No listicle. Nothing targeting شركة تسويق, because it is somebody else's customer at somebody else's moment.

Four situations, four different answers

Same map, four different doors. Find the row that describes you.

The method transfers. Run it on your own category.

This report studied one narrow category, and the method underneath it is not narrow at all. Four steps, in this order.

The fourth step is the one that separates a keyword list from a strategy. Every category has a set of unnamed zeros. The brand that names them correctly does not compete for that keyword later. It owns it, because it wrote it.

Six numbers, one afternoon, no tools you do not already have

Before you commission anything, pull these six numbers for your own domain and your own category. The case study site in this report scored badly on four of them, which is why it is the case study.

Six numbers beat six months of opinion. The assessment below runs the same logic on your marketing function rather than your website: about five minutes, and it returns a maturity stage and the three things to fix first.

Frequently asked questions

Sources, method and limits

Method. All keyword figures in this report were pulled from Ubersuggest on 26 July 2026 through a single endpoint, the keyword overview, for Saudi Arabia in Arabic and English, the United Arab Emirates in English, and the United States in English as a ceiling. Search page data came from live analysis of thirteen keywords, eight Saudi and five American. Mixing endpoints produces different answers for the same keyword, so this report does not mix them.

Five limits, stated plainly. One, keyword volumes are estimates and they overstate: an Ahrefs study of 72,635 keywords against real Search Console data found 91.45% of Google Keyword Planner volumes were overestimates, and its "roughly accurate" band meant within 50% either way. That study only covered the 1,000 to 10,000 range, which is above almost everything here. Treat these numbers as ratios between keywords, not as counts of people.

Two, the same tool gives different answers hours apart. Four keywords were pulled twice on 26 July 2026 during the research. "Marketing agency riyadh" returned 590 then 720, at 4.95 then 8.04 dollars a click. "Marketing agency saudi arabia" returned 170 then 210, at 2.85 then 6.35 dollars. "Branding agency riyadh" returned 90 then 110, at 21.43 then 31.90 dollars. "Advertising in saudi arabia" moved the other way, 90 down to 70, while its cost per click went from 16.90 to 29.72. This report uses the later pull throughout, and prints this list so you can see the size of the wobble rather than take a single figure on faith.

Three, the keyword suggestion index is not current: suggestion data carries a timestamp of 21 January 2026, roughly six months before publication, which is why this report relies on directly queried keywords rather than the tool's own suggestions. Live search page data was pulled in July 2026 and is current. Four, every click and AI Overview study cited above measured United States behaviour; none measured Saudi Arabia or Arabic search results, and Google's 95.81% share of Saudi search makes the extrapolation defensible without making it measured. Five, there is no credible public measurement of the Arabic against English query split in Saudi Arabia; every article claiming one traces back to an SEO blog rather than a primary source, so the language comparison above compares tool volumes, which is a different and weaker claim.

Sources. Search data: Ubersuggest keyword overview, SERP, domain, backlink and PageSpeed endpoints, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and United States, pulled 26 July 2026. Saudi statistics: GASTAT ICT Access and Usage by Individuals 2025; GASTAT GDP Q2 2025; Statcounter Saudi Arabia June 2026; DataReportal Digital 2026 Saudi Arabia. Market context: Research and Markets, Saudi Arabia digital advertising forecast, February 2026; MHRSD Saudization decision for marketing occupations, effective 19 January 2026; GulfTalent salary data, July 2026, sample of 20, treated as indicative only. Search behaviour: Pew Research Center, AI summaries and clicks, July 2025, 900 US adults and 68,879 searches; Ahrefs AI Overview click study, 2025, 300,000 keywords; Semrush AI Overview keyword distribution, 2026; SparkToro and Similarweb zero click data, 2026, US only and excluding the Google mobile app; Ahrefs Search Console against Keyword Planner study, 72,635 keywords. Buyer behaviour: 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report 2025, approximately 4,000 respondents, published as vendor research. Language data: W3Techs content language survey, 26 July 2026.

Two widely repeated statistics were checked and dropped. The claim that Arabic makes up around 3% of online content has no findable primary source; W3Techs measures Arabic as the content language of 0.6% of websites, which is a different claim. The claim that buyers complete 57% of the journey before contacting a vendor traces to a 2011 study that cannot be located in its own publisher's database, and 6sense's 2025 figure of 61% is down from 69% the year before, which reverses the usual narrative.

The words they type · 2026

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About BMD

Building Your Marketing Department (BMD) helps executives in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf build marketing departments that produce measurable return, using the BUILD framework. Redha Alayesh has built 3 marketing departments and worked with more than 40. Clients and collaborations have included Alyaseen Agri, Ithra, IBM and the Saudi Esports Federation. Delivered in Arabic and English, founder-led.

Redha Alayesh

A marketer with a software engineer's discipline and a scientist's mindset. Across 20+ organizations in the GCC, he built the BUILD framework to solve the problem he kept finding: capable marketers trapped inside companies that never decided what marketing was for.

Disclosure: the website analysed throughout this report is his own, and it currently ranks for nothing in any market. That is the point of using it. BMD also sells consulting, a book, and assessments on this topic. Read the argument, then test it against your own numbers.