Inconnect Solutions · Digital marketing agency in Rawalpindi
Urdu SEO Guide: Keyword Research, RTL Setup & hreflang
How to get found by people who search in Urdu script, Roman Urdu and English, without breaking your layout or splitting your rankings.
dir="rtl", and link each Urdu page to its English twin with matching hreflang tags. Our SEO team can set this up for you.Why Your Business Needs an Urdu SEO Guide
This Urdu SEO guide starts with a simple picture. One shopper types a question in Urdu script. Another types the same question in English letters, the way they text a friend: “ghar ke liye AC kitne ka milta hai”. A third mixes both. All three want the same answer, but search engines see three different queries.
If your site only speaks English, the first two never find you. If you add Urdu carelessly, you can end up with pages that compete with each other or display badly on a phone. A good Urdu SEO guide covers three jobs, and this one walks through each: finding the words people really use, building pages that read correctly right-to-left, and telling Google which version belongs to which audience.
Urdu SEO Guide to Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step of any Urdu SEO guide. Do not translate your English keyword list word for word. Urdu speakers often use different phrases, and many searches never use Urdu script at all. Work through these four steps.
Step 1: Start from your services, not a tool
Write down what customers ask on calls and WhatsApp. Real questions beat any exported list, because they use the exact wording your buyers use.
Step 2: Collect all three spellings
For every topic, note the Urdu script version, the Roman Urdu version and the English version. Type each into Google’s search box and note the autocomplete suggestions. Roman Urdu has no fixed spelling, so “kaise”, “kese” and “kaisay” can all appear. Keep the variants in one list.
Step 3: Read the results page yourself
Search each form and see what ranks. If the top results are all Urdu-script articles, an English page will struggle. If they are mixed or mostly English, you may not need a full Urdu page at all. Check whether the results are guides, service pages or videos, because that tells you what format to publish.
Step 4: Group by intent, one page per group
Put keywords that want the same answer on the same page. Give each page one main keyword. This is also how you avoid cannibalization: two of your pages should never target the same phrase. For example, our local SEO in Pakistan guide covers map rankings, while this page covers language and script. Different goals, different keywords.
Right-to-left page setup
Urdu is written right to left, so every Urdu SEO guide must cover page direction. Browsers need to be told, and the correct place to do it is in your HTML, not your stylesheet. W3C’s guidance on RTL setup for Urdu SEO pages says to put the direction on the html element and avoid using CSS for the base direction.
<html lang="ur" dir="rtl">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>اردو عنوان یہاں</title>
</head>What changes besides the text
Menu order, breadcrumbs, arrows, “next” and “back” buttons, and list bullets.
Phone numbers, English brand names, code, and video play icons. Wrap English phrases in
<span dir="ltr"> so they do not jumble.Fonts and speed
Urdu is usually shown in Nastaliq style, which needs generous line height (around 1.9 to 2.1) or the lines will crash into each other. Nastaliq web fonts are large, so load only the weights you use and set font-display: swap. Test on a cheap Android phone, not just your laptop.
Connecting versions with hreflang
The last technical piece of this Urdu SEO guide is hreflang. If you publish the same page in English and Urdu, hreflang tells Google they are twins, so each audience gets the right one. Google’s documentation on hreflang for Urdu SEO lists the rules that matter most: every version must list itself and all the others, and the links must be reciprocal or they are ignored.
Add this block inside the head of both pages. Use your real URLs, and use full addresses including https://.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/guide/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ur" href="https://example.com/ur/guide/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/guide/">Use ur when the page is for Urdu speakers anywhere, and ur-PK only if you also publish a separate version for another country. Do not use hreflang for Roman Urdu: it is not a separate language code, so cover it with keywords inside your English or Urdu page instead. Google also notes that it does not use the HTML lang attribute to detect a page’s language, so the on-page text must really be in Urdu.
Mistakes we see most often
- Machine translation published as is. It reads stiffly and loses the phrases people search. Have a native speaker edit it.
- One-way hreflang. The Urdu page points to English but English does not point back, so Google ignores both.
- Mixed pages. Half English, half Urdu paragraphs make the page’s language unclear. Keep each URL in one main language.
- Forgetting Urdu titles and meta descriptions. The search result is the first thing people see. Write both in Urdu.
- No internal links. Link Urdu pages from your Urdu menu and from related Urdu articles, not only from the English site.
FAQs
Do I need Urdu pages if my customers understand English?
Check the search results first. If competitors rank only with English pages for your main terms, you may not. If Urdu or Roman Urdu searches show different results, an Urdu page is a real opportunity.
Should I put Urdu in a subfolder or on another domain?
A subfolder such as /ur/ is easier to manage for most small businesses, because the pages share one site’s authority. Google accepts alternate URLs on other domains too, so choose what you can maintain.
Will an Urdu page be treated as duplicate content?
Not when the main text is truly translated. Google’s documentation says localized versions count as duplicates only if the main content stays untranslated.
How do I target Roman Urdu searches?
Use the common spellings naturally in headings, FAQs and image alt text on the page that answers the question. There is no hreflang code for it.
Want your site to rank in Urdu too?
Inconnect Solutions is a digital marketing agency in Rawalpindi. We handle keyword research, RTL development and hreflang setup together.
Book a free consultationWant a team to apply this Urdu SEO guide to your site? See our web development service for building the Urdu pages.