How to do SEO in Italy in 2026: a guide for the Italian market

As with every year in the SEO industry, one of the main challenges of 2026 is keeping up with rapid changes in the digital landscape. SEO in 2026 is not even what it was two years ago, let alone 20 years ago, when I started my career.

Technology keeps evolving and new players keep entering the field, and I’ve always adapted my SEO strategies to match. Search engines now answer many questions with AI before anyone clicks a link, and people ask longer, more conversational questions.

The basics still hold: useful content, a site that works, and links you’ve earned. What changed is how you get seen. Embracing the change is not just smart, it’s survival.

Italy adds its own twist. More than 53 million Italians are online, but only about 3% of websites are written in Italian. A large audience with less competition is an opportunity, if you speak to Italians the way they actually search. This guide covers both: how to do SEO in 2026, and how to do it in Italy.

What is SEO, and why it’s not dead yet

In the unlikely event that the reader of this article¹ doesn’t know what SEO is: it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Long story short: everything you do to make a website more visible in search engines like Google. If that’s news to you, this guide is a good place to start.

Now, you might have heard somebody say that with AI, SEO is dead. I won’t even start counting how many times I’ve heard “SEO is dead”. Suffice it to say there were already articles with that title when I started (again, 20 years ago).

Consider this: as long as there are businesses that need to be found by the people looking for what they offer, there will be a need for SEO. What changes is how you do it. Today, SEO is technical optimization, quality content, reputation building and performance analysis, all aimed at long-term business goals, whether the answer appears in a list of blue links or in an AI summary.

Why Italy

Italy is not a small market. It has 59 million people, and 53.1 million of them, almost 9 in 10, are online². And they buy: online purchases in Italy are worth €67 billion in 2026, up 6% on the previous year³. Yet Italian is the language of only 2.8% of websites, while English covers almost half of the web⁴.

In practice, an English-language page, even one optimized for every SEO factor⁵, competes with a huge share of the web for every query, while in Italian the same query often has far fewer serious contenders.

If you’re a foreign business, the quickest shortcut is to translate the pages you already have, maybe yourself, maybe with help from AI. Yet even a good translation only gives you correct Italian. It doesn’t necessarily give you the words Italians type into a search bar, the words that can’t be misread, or, even more, the words that make Italians tick and click. (More on that in the keyword research section.)

That’s the gap: a large audience, fewer pages written for it, and even fewer competitors who took the time to make those pages sound natural, not dull and neglected, to the people reading them.

It doesn’t mean ranking in Italy is easy. It means effort goes further here, if it’s done in Italian and not just translated into it.

Search engines in Italy in 2026

If you’re wondering which search engine Italians use, the answer hasn’t changed much: Google, with 87.3% of the Italian search market in September 2026⁶.

One detail worth considering: together, Bing (6%) and Yahoo! (5%) account for about 11% of Italian searches, roughly one in ten. And since Yahoo!’s results have long been powered largely by Bing, a little extra work on Bing could reach both. Not bad.

So, not much has changed over the years in which search engine Italians use. What did change is what happens after the search. Google now often answers with an AI-generated summary before the list of links, and more people put their questions straight to AI assistants. Being found in Italy in 2026 means being the source those answers draw from, not just a blue link.

Or, as an esteemed colleague put it, this is not the time to give up SEO: it’s the time to do more SEO than ever.

Keyword research in Italian

Keyword research is still where every SEO strategy starts, as long as the technical fundamentals are covered (more on that later). It means finding the words your potential customers actually type. In Italy, as in any country where your main language isn’t spoken, there’s one rule that matters more than any tool: don’t translate your keywords, research them.

A translation gives you the words a dictionary would choose. Keyword research gives you the words Italians type (or say aloud to their phone) in Google.
Take an English long-tail keyword like “best hiking trails near me”. A literal translation would be “migliori sentieri escursionistici vicino a me”: correct Italian, but Italians might be more likely to search for “migliori percorsi trekking vicino a me”.
Here’s a quick visual to see how they compare:

That’s why this work is called transcreation rather than translation, and why it’s best done by a native speaker who knows the culture, not just the language.

And then there’s Italy itself. Italian varies from region to region, and not just in accent. The same thing can have different names: a watermelon is an anguria in the north and a cocomero in central Italy, and in Sicily they still argue whether it’s arancino or arancina. If your business targets a specific area, or the whole country, check which words people use where. Google Trends shows search interest by region, for free.

Where to start

• Google itself. Type a broad term into the search bar and look at the suggestions. It’s free, and it shows you how Italians complete their own queries.
• Google Keyword Planner, Semrush or Ahrefs for search volumes and competition. Set the location to Italy and the language to Italian.
• SEOzoom, an Italian tool built specifically for the Italian market.
• Google Search Console, once your Italian pages are live. It shows the queries people actually used to find you, often ones you’d never have guessed.

Fishing, not hunting

When it comes to choosing which keywords to focus on, most SEO strategies take an approach we could call “hunting”: pick the most competitive keywords and chase them. I find this approach slow and expensive, especially when:

• your market is very competitive, and your competitors already have teams of SEOs chasing the same keywords;
• you’re entering a market you don’t know yet, for example the Italian one, when you’re well established internationally and want to expand locally;
• your website is new or relatively new. That includes a new language version of your site, especially on a new domain (e.g. yourbrand.it) or subdomain (e.g. it.yourbrand.com).

I prefer fishing. Even better: exploring, and finding blue oceans where your competitors haven’t dared to venture yet.

How? Start by listening. Ask yourself what your Italian customers are looking for, the words they type, the problems they want solved. And then publish great, useful content around it. It’s like casting a net in the open sea.

Then see what you catch. Google Search Console will tell you which questions brought people to your content, and which pages Google and AI tools picked up.

That’s your private data, not the public numbers your competitors see in the same SEO tools every specialist uses. Comb through the Performance report for opportunities only you can see, and when you find one, treat it as your own corner of the sea, the one only you know is full of fish. Build on what works.

Long-tail keywords, longer and more specific queries like “scarpe da trekking impermeabili donna” (women’s waterproof hiking shoes) rather than “scarpe da trekking”, are usually where the first fish bite: less competition, and closer to a decision. That’s a good place to start. But sometimes it also pays to dare, and sail where no one has ventured yet. (More on my Italian content strategy →)

The foundations of SEO in 2026: they haven’t changed much, have they?

Now that we’ve covered where an SEO strategy (usually) starts, let’s talk about the fundamentals. These are probably the elements you’re most familiar with, even if you’re not an SEO professional. And while the rules don’t change from the global web (the bigger English one) to the local one (the smaller Italian one), you still can’t simply translate each element from one language to another. You need to make some adjustments.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is everything you optimize on the page itself, one page of your website at a time: the title tag, meta description, headings, text, images, internal links, and fancy features like a TOC⁷, an FAQ section⁸ and structured data (schema markup)⁹.

The rules are the same in every language. What changes in Italian is the words you fill them with.

Take the title tag, still one of the most important on-page elements. Every page needs its own, unique title (or a cannibalization apocalypse is on the way¹⁰). It’s the first thing people see in search results, and sometimes what AI tools quote. A literal translation of your English title may be correct Italian and still miss how Italians search and what makes them click.

In other words, sometimes the “correct” translation isn’t the one Italians search for:

The dictionary says “scarpe da corsa”, but Italians often borrow the English word: “scarpe running uomo” gets more than three times the searches (18,100 a month vs 5,400)¹¹. Sometimes transcreation means translating less. (More examples on my ads transcreation page →)

Then there’s length. Italian often takes more words than English to say the same thing, and Google cuts titles that are too long (roughly beyond 60 characters, depending on their width). Here’s a visual:

The literal translation would be cut off in the results, right before ‘gratuiti’: the word that makes shipping and returns free.

The transcreation makes a choice instead: it keeps the keywords and the strongest selling point, and fits.

Word choice and length matter just as much in the rest of the page:

• Meta description: your ad in the search results. Write it in Italian, not translated into Italian, and keep it short enough to show in full, but not so short that you lose the chance to deliver your message: just a little shy of 158 characters. Better still, test it with a snippet preview tool that measures the pixels.
• URL slug: make it Italian too. /scarpe-trekking-impermeabili-donna/ tells Italians (and Google) what the page is about. /womens-waterproof-hiking-shoes/ on an Italian page might not.
• Headings (H1, H2, H3): structure the page around the questions Italians actually ask, and respect the order: one H1, then H2s, H3s and so on, without skipping levels.
• Text: write naturally, for people. Use the keyword where it fits, plus synonyms and related words, but don’t cram it into every sentence. Keyword stuffing makes the text worse for readers and doesn’t fool search engines.
• Image alt text: describe images in Italian, for accessibility and for image search.
• Structured data: if you use it, transcreate it as well. Product names, descriptions and FAQ answers in your schema markup should be in Italian, matching what’s on the page.
• Internal links: where the context and content make sense, link to your other Italian pages. When you transcreate a page from English, don’t forget the links: point them to the Italian versions, not the English originals. (Sorry to state the obvious, but it happens.) Anchor text matters but needs care: not “click here”, but not the same keyword-rich anchor repeated across your whole site either.

And beyond all that, your page has to be pleasant to use: easy to read, easy to navigate, quick to answer the question that brought people there. That’s UX (user experience), and both your visitors and search engines notice it (more on that later).

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is everything that makes your site fast, secure, easy to use and easy for search engines to crawl.

A page can have the best Italian copy in the world, but if it’s slow, jumps around while loading or is hard to use on a phone, people leave, and search engines notice. Technical SEO is what makes the experience work behind the scenes.

Core Web Vitals. Google measures part of the user experience with three metrics: loading, responsiveness and visual stability.

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how fast the main content loads.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page responds when you tap or click. It replaced FID in 2024, so if a guide still mentions FID, it’s out of date.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how stable the page stays while loading, with no buttons jumping away from your finger.

Check them for free in PageSpeed Insights and in Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report.

The basics that still matter:

• Speed: the bottom line is simple: the faster your website loads, the better. Or, more accurately, the slower it is, the worse. The causes vary. Maybe your server doesn’t have the resources for the new hordes of visitors your SEO brought in over the past weeks and months. Or maybe your setup carries too much heavy code and too many assets, usually a lot of it unused. Or your server is simply far from your visitors: if most of them are in Italy, a CDN (a network that serves your site from servers closer to them) can help.
• Mobile first: Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so that’s the version that counts. And in Italy, just over half of all web page views now come from mobile devices.
• HTTPS: a secure site is a given in 2026.
• Crawling and indexing: a clean sitemap (ideally one that updates automatically when you publish new content), no important pages blocked, no broken links or duplicate pages. Search Console’s Page indexing report shows what Google can and can’t index.
• Site architecture: a clear structure, with categories that make sense and every important page reachable in a few clicks. It helps people find their way, and helps search engines understand what matters most on your site.

If you’re curious, here’s the device split in Italy:

The Italian part: the right page, in the right Italian

If your site exists in more than one language, Google needs to know which version to show to whom. That’s what hreflang tags do: they tell Google that /it/scarpe-running-uomo/ is the Italian version of /en/mens-running-shoes/, so Italians get the Italian page and English speakers the English one.

Then there’s where your Italian site lives:

• Subfolder (yourbrand.com/it/): it builds on your main domain’s authority. It’s usually the simplest choice.
• Subdomain (it.yourbrand.com): Google can treat it more like a separate site.
• Italian domain (yourbrand.it): a strong local signal, but it starts from scratch.

There’s no single right answer. It depends on your business, your budget and how Italian you want to look.

And once Italians land on the Italian version, everything should be not only in Italian (menus, categories, buttons, forms, error messages, cookie banner) but also worded the way Italians expect to see it. Half-translated navigation is one of the quickest ways to tell visitors the Italian site was an afterthought.

Here are a few examples of how a menu item can go wrong in translation. Some are rare these days, but you get the point:

User experience (UX)

Technical SEO makes the page work. UX makes people want to stay. Or scroll. Or click. And guess what: that’s SEO too. A page with a good user experience is easy to read, easy to navigate and quick to answer the question that brought people there. How people behave on it, staying or bouncing straight back to the results, is what SEOs call user signals, and search engines notice the difference.

A few things that make the difference:

• Answer first. Put what people came for near the top, not after three paragraphs of introduction.
• Readable text. Short paragraphs, clear headings, a font size you don’t need to zoom in on.
• No obstacles. Pop-ups that cover the content as soon as the page opens annoy users, and Google warns they can hurt your search performance. If you need one, a small banner works better than a full-screen overlay.
• Clear next steps. Make it obvious what to do next: buy, call, read more, get in touch.

And beyond all that, your website should be designed to serve your audience as well as possible: it should look appealing, be easy to navigate, and communicate clearly. Which brings us to the Italian part.

The Italian part: how your site sounds is part of the experience

Being addressed the wrong way is uncomfortable, online too. English has one “you”. Italian has several ways to address the reader: the informal tu, the formal Lei, the plural voi, or an impersonal form. Each one tells your visitors who you think they are. Tu is the usual choice online, even for many professional brands, while Lei is still expected where distance is part of the respect: law, medicine, finance, luxury. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent across the whole site. A page that says tu next to one that says Lei feels like talking to two different companies. (More on choosing the right voice →)

Content marketing: the very best marketing there is

What if I told you that you can promote your business without sounding pushy or annoying?

What if I told you that you can be found, instead of chasing customers? (That would be SEO, wouldn’t it?)

What if I told you that you can reach your audience by being at their service, and showing them you actually offer something incredibly useful?

That’s content marketing: creating brilliant content that serves your audience and shows them the value of your products and services.

Good content answers real questions better than the other pages competing for them. Every query typed into Google is a question someone is asking, and what they actually want behind it is what SEOs call user intent (or search intent). If that question happens to be one of your keywords, it’s a question you need to answer in the best possible way. Do that and, allow me the emphasis, you’re already halfway to the top of the rankings.

That hasn’t changed. What has changed is who reads your answers: people, search engines, and now AI tools choosing what to quote. All three reward the same thing: content written for Italians, not translated for them, that actually helps.

A few principles:

• Be the source. Share what only you know: your experience, your data, your examples. That’s what makes content worth quoting, by people and AI alike.
• Keep it alive. Update your best pages instead of letting them age. (This guide is the 2026 update of a 2024 one.)
• Show, don’t just tell. Examples, tables and images make content easier to read and to understand.

Off-page SEO: links earned, not built

Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside your website but still affects how visible and trustworthy it looks: links from other sites, mentions of your brand, your presence on social media. (Note that social media doesn’t have a direct effect on SEO, but it does on your brand… and so, indirectly, on your SEO!)

Links are still one of the strongest signals of trust. But the days of buying or swapping links by the dozen are long gone. Google stopped rewarding that years ago, and it can still get a site penalized.

What works today is closer to PR than to old-fashioned link building: give relevant Italian websites a reason to talk about you. A useful article on a site your customers actually read brings real visitors, makes your brand known, and can help you appear in AI-generated answers too.

In Italy, that means Italian sites and voices: industry blogs, trade magazines, local news, associations, and creators your audience follows. A link from a respected Italian site in your niche is worth more than ten from sites nobody in Italy reads. (Ever heard of “quality over quantity”?) And if a placement is paid, label it as sponsored. Hiding it is exactly what gets brands into trouble. (More on Italian articles that earn their place →)

Where Italians are on social media

Social media won’t move your rankings directly, but it’s where your brand gets seen. And a brand or ad campaign can benefit your SEO indirectly too, if you know what you’re doing: more people who know your name means more people searching for it. Here’s how many Italians each platform’s ads can reach:

Local SEO: if you’re physically in Italy

Selling online from abroad? You can skip this part. But if you have a shop, an office, a hotel or a service area in Italy, local SEO helps you show up when people search nearby: “near me” searches, Google Maps, the map box in the results.

Local words: remember the anguria and the cocomero? If you target a specific city or region, use the words people use there, and check them by region in Google Trends.

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business): claim it, complete it in Italian, and keep it updated: opening hours, photos, services, holiday closures. For many local searches, it’s the first thing people see, before your website.

Reviews: ask happy customers for them, and reply to all of them, the negative ones too. In Italian, of course.

Directories and listings: make sure your business appears with the same name, address and phone number everywhere it’s listed, from general directories to the ones that matter in your industry (TripAdvisor for hospitality, for example).

AI answers and SEO

More and more often, the answer comes before the click. Google shows AI-generated summaries above the results, and people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity directly. So how do you get found when the user may never see a list of links?

By being the source. AI answers are built on content found across the web, and they tend to cite pages that answer clearly, can be trusted and are easy to understand. In practice, everything in this guide still applies, plus a few habits:

• Answer clearly and early. One question, one clear answer, near the top of the page or the section. AI tools quote what they can lift without rewriting.
• Be the original. Your own data, experience and examples. If ten sites say the same thing, there’s no reason to quote yours.
• Get mentioned. Brand mentions on trusted Italian sites (remember off-page SEO?) also tell AI tools who’s relevant in your field.
• Don’t forget Bing. Some AI assistants rely partly on Bing’s index, not only Google’s. One more reason for that “little extra work”.

And nowadays, it seems you don’t need to panic about measuring it either: clicks and impressions from Google’s AI features are included in your Search Console Performance report, together with the rest of your web traffic (though not shown separately).

But here’s an interesting table to take into account:

What does this mean? Only that AI chatbots still send a tiny fraction of the traffic search engines do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean people aren’t getting their answers from AI chats: they may simply get the answer and never click. But it’s still strong data for SEO: search brings almost 9 visits in 10.

And what about using AI for your Italian SEO?

Of course. I use it every day. AI is a great partner for brainstorming keywords, surfacing synonyms and expressions, drafting variants and spotting phrases that sound off. But it lays out options; it doesn’t make choices. (Or it shouldn’t! If you let your AI of choice make the choices for you, you’ll soon be reading a message like “Sorry, you’re right…” when you ask it to explain some unintended consequences.)

In the end, which word your Italian customers actually type, which sentence makes them trust you: that still takes a native ear, working with AI rather than being replaced by it.

Measuring results

SEO is a long game, so measure it like one. Rankings are nice to look at, but they’re not the goal. Your business is.

• Start from your goals. Leads, sales, bookings, sign-ups: decide what success means for your Italian site before you look at any chart.
• Search Console shows how Google sees you: clicks, impressions, average position and the queries behind them. Filter by country (Italy) or by your Italian pages (/it/) to see the Italian market on its own.
• Google Analytics shows what happens after the click: which pages Italians read, and whether they buy, call or get in touch.
• Watch your brand searches. More people searching for your brand name in Italy is one of the best signs your SEO, content and PR are working, in search engines and AI answers alike.
• Be patient. A new Italian site or section usually needs months, not weeks, to show what it can do. Judge trends, not single days.

Competitor analysis: know who else is fishing

Remember the open blue ocean? Sometimes there isn’t one, and you find yourself in waters where other boats are already out. Fishing doesn’t mean ignoring your competitors.

In Italy, they may not be the ones you expect. Next to the international brands you already know, there are often local businesses that know the market, the language and the customers better than anyone.

Search your main Italian keywords and look at who ranks: what they write about, how they say it, which Italian sites link to them. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz can do the heavy lifting, and track how your competitors’ rankings and traffic change over time. Majestic is handy for checking backlinks.

But remember: you’re not there to copy them. You’re there to find what they’re missing.

Conclusion: your map to Italy

SEO in 2026 has changed (as it does every year). AI answers sit above the links, and people ask longer questions. But the core hasn’t moved: be the best answer to what people are looking for, on a site that works, recommended by sources they trust.

In Italy, add one more layer: speak Italian, not translated English. Research your keywords, don’t translate them. Respect the culture, the regional words and the conventions Italians expect. Earn your links from Italian sites. Then let your own data, not your competitors’ tools, show you where the fish are.

The Italian web is large, and still less crowded than the English one. The X is on the map. Now it’s up to you to get there.

If you’d like a native Italian with 20 years of SEO experience to help you get there, let’s talk, or find out more about me.

1. That’d be you, reading this very article. Yeah: you! ↩︎
2. 53.1 million internet users, 89.9% of the population, end of 2025. DataReportal, Digital 2026: Italy. ↩︎
3. Osservatorio eCommerce B2c Netcomm – School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, May 2026, as reported by Pagamenti Digitali. ↩︎
4. Italian is the content language of 2.8% of websites, English of 49.5%, October 2026. W3Techs. ↩︎
5. “Every SEO factor” is a bit of a stretch. Search engines don’t publish their full list of ranking factors, let alone how much each one weighs. Google confirms a few, like HTTPS and page experience, but most “SEO factors” you read about come from professionals’ tests, correlation studies and experience: educated guesses rather than official facts. ↩︎
6. Statcounter, Search Engine Market Share in Italy, September 2026. ↩︎
7. TOC: Table of contents, a list of links to the sections of the page. It helps readers jump to what they need, and Google sometimes shows those links directly in the search results. ↩︎
8. FAQ section: a list of frequently asked questions with short answers. Since 2023, Google shows FAQ rich results only for a few authoritative government and health websites, but a good FAQ still helps readers, and gives search engines and AI tools clear answers to quote. ↩︎
9. Structured data (schema markup): code added to a page, usually in JSON-LD format and using the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines what the content is: an article, a product, a business, a recipe. It can make a page eligible for rich results, such as star ratings or prices in the search results. ↩︎
10. Keyword cannibalization: when two or more pages of your site target the same query, they end up competing with each other instead of with your competitors. Google may switch between them or pick the one you didn’t want, and neither ranks as well as one strong page would. Identical titles are often the first sign. ↩︎
11. Monthly searches from a keyword research tool, Italy, October 2026. ↩︎