Billions of online searches by some 5 million people (a combination of citizens and residents; not including visitors to the nation) in the Sultanate of Oman give us an insight into the most-searched-for businesses in the country.

By 2022, Oman added over 81,000 new small- and medium-level enterprises (SMEs) into the market, which was an increase of 46.8 per cent over the numbers from 2021.

This was stoked by a stronger economy fueled by higher oil prices, strong government response to curbing debt and funnelling new national-level projects.

Startups across the globe play a signification role in shaping a country’s economic growth and goals – and the deep-rooted dynamics SMEs play to the Omani economy is no different.

But what type of businesses are people in Oman most interested in initiating?

While the general consensus would tick towards the hydrocarbon or food and hospitality industries, new research by ZenBusiness shows that entrepreneurs in Oman are increasingly focussing on technology, particularly: software.

In contrast, Oman’s brotherly GCC neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates showed heavy interest in imports and exports, especially oil, which makes up some 30 per cent of their GDO and 41 per cent of their public revenues.

Meanwhile, FIFA 2022 World Cup host Qatar showed heavy business interest in Email advertising, Bahrain in shipping, and Kuwait in advertising.

Methodology

The research was determined on online search trends using the AHREF platform.

The methodology for acquiring the data was based on inputting the term ‘start a business’ or an equivalent (i.e., the most spoken language of the respective country) in the “Keywords Explorer” section of the website, and marking the subsection with ”Matching terms.”

To allow further analysis of differently worded keywords and their translations after data collection, the team added a “Business Type” column for categorising keywords by their type.

They then calculated the term “Top 10 Worldwide” by ranking unique keyword types from the countries’ dataset by the number of occurrences in descending order.

*The data is accurate as of February 2022.

Source: Zen Business, Visual Capitalist