Beirut · Lebanon
SEO and AI Search Services in Lebanon
Search visibility engineered for the Lebanese market, in the three languages your customers actually search in: Arabic, French and English.
Based in BeirutServing Lebanon and the wider region
HOWF (Habib Obeid Web Foundations) is a web and AI engineering firm based in Beirut, Lebanon. Among our services, we offer Lebanese businesses SEO and AI search optimization (GEO): technical SEO, local search, content and visibility in AI assistants, across Arabic, French and English. Most firms ranking in Lebanon publish in English only; we build and measure the Arabic and French halves of Lebanese search, which is where most of the unclaimed traffic sits.
What we do for Lebanese businesses
Four workstreams. Most engagements start with the first two, because there is rarely any point producing content for a site search engines are struggling to read.
Technical SEO
Crawlability, indexation, site architecture, Core Web Vitals, structured data and hreflang for multilingual sites. This is where most Lebanese sites lose before they start: a trilingual site with no hreflang tells Google it has three duplicate sites rather than one site in three languages, and Google picks one, usually not the one you wanted.
Local SEO for Beirut and Lebanon
Google Business Profile setup and optimization, local landing pages, citation consistency across Lebanese directories, and review acquisition. For most commercial queries in Lebanon the local pack sits above the organic results, so this is usually the fastest visibility available: weeks rather than months.
Content and on-page, in three languages
Keyword and intent research run separately in Arabic, French and English, because they return genuinely different demand. Pages written for the language they target, not machine-translated from an English original, a distinction Google has become considerably better at spotting.
AI search optimization (GEO/AEO)
Being the answer ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite. Answer-first structure, entity clarity, and the schema that lets an engine resolve who you are with confidence. Lebanese-market coverage in these engines is thin, which makes the ground unusually cheap right now.
Why the Arabic half is the opportunity
Lebanese search does not happen in one language. The same customer looking for the same service may type it in Arabic, in French, in English, or in Arabizi: Arabic written in Latin characters with numerals standing in for letters that have no Latin equivalent. These are not variations of one query. They return different results, with different competitors, at different levels of difficulty.
Almost every agency currently ranking for SEO queries in Lebanon publishes in English only. That is a large, structural gap: the Arabic and French queries are genuinely less contested, and a business that covers all three languages properly is competing against far fewer serious pages than the English numbers suggest.
Doing it properly means more than running the English page through a translator. It means researching demand natively in each language, writing for each audience, declaring the relationship between the versions with correct hreflang, and getting right-to-left typography and layout right in Arabic so the page does not read as an afterthought. We build our own site this way, which is the only reason we are willing to claim it.
How an engagement runs
Measured before, measured after. You should be able to audit the difference rather than take our word for it.
- 01
Technical and competitive audit
We crawl the site as a search engine does, establish the current indexation and performance baseline, and map the three-language competitive landscape. You leave with a prioritised findings document whether or not you continue with us.
- 02
Fix the foundations
Indexation, architecture, speed, structured data and hreflang. Unglamorous, and almost always where the first real movement comes from. Content produced before this step tends to underperform for reasons nobody can see.
- 03
Local presence
Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Lebanese directory citations with consistent details, and a review process your team can actually sustain. This is the part that usually moves first.
- 04
Content and authority
A publishing cadence in the languages that matter for your market, plus earned links from Lebanese and regional sources: press, industry bodies, universities, chambers. Links remain the slowest input and the one that decides the ceiling.
- 05
Measure, in public
Rankings by language, local pack positions, organic traffic and conversions, plus AI-engine citation tracking. Monthly reporting that shows what moved, what did not, and what we changed as a result.
What it costs
Published because hiding it wastes everyone’s time. These are starting points; scope moves them.
Audit
From $1,500 · one-off
A full technical, local and three-language competitive audit with a prioritised plan. Yours to keep and implement with any team, including your own.
Local
From $1,200 / month
Single-location Lebanese businesses competing on local search: Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, local pages, one publishing language.
Growth
From $3,000 / month
Multi-location or trilingual businesses, e-commerce, and organisations competing on national or regional queries across Arabic, French and English.
No long lock-ins. We would rather you stay because the reporting is convincing than because the contract is.
Proof
We publish outcomes, not logos, until a client has given written permission to be named. Several Lebanese engagements are in that approval process now and will appear here with their numbers when it completes: named, dated and checkable, or not at all.
In the meantime the most honest evidence available is this site. Run it through any auditor you like: Core Web Vitals, structured data, hreflang across three indexed languages, accessible contrast, a nonce-based content security policy. We hold our own estate to the standard we sell, because an agency whose own site fails the audit it charges for is telling you something.
Questions
- How long does SEO take to work in Lebanon?
- Local pack visibility can move within four to eight weeks of a Google Business Profile going live with genuine reviews. Organic first-page positions for competitive Lebanese queries typically take three to six months, and top positions six to twelve, depending mainly on how many referring domains you start with. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling something else.
- Do you work in Arabic and French, or only English?
- All three, as separate research and writing tracks rather than translations of each other. Arabic and French are usually where the least contested demand is in Lebanon, so treating them as an afterthought leaves most of the opportunity on the table.
- Do I need a physical office in Beirut to rank locally?
- No. Google supports service-area businesses without a public street address. You do need a verifiable presence, consistent details everywhere you are listed, and genuine reviews. An invented address fails verification and is a serious risk to the profile.
- What is AI search optimization, and does it matter yet in Lebanon?
- It is the work of becoming the source that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite when someone asks a question in your category. It matters more in Lebanon than in saturated markets precisely because coverage is thin: there are Lebanese categories where no authoritative source has been established in any language, and establishing one is cheap today and expensive later.
- Can you work with our existing developers or agency?
- Yes, and often that is the sensible arrangement. We can specify the work and hand it to your team, implement it ourselves, or split it. What we will not do is quietly gatekeep the changes so you cannot leave.
- Do you require a long contract?
- No. SEO needs continuity to compound, so we ask for a realistic horizon, usually six months, but not a lock-in. If the reporting is not persuasive, that is information you are entitled to act on.
- What do you need from us to start?
- Access to Google Search Console, Google Analytics and the Google Business Profile if one exists, plus someone who can approve content and make decisions. Where access does not exist yet, setting it up correctly is part of the first phase.
- Do you only work with Lebanese clients?
- No. HOWF is an enterprise web engineering and AI integration firm working internationally; Lebanon is home and a market we know in all three of its languages. The same engineering standard applies either way.
Start with the audit
Tell us the domain and the languages you care about. You will get a findings document you can act on with any team, ours included or not.