Need a native Italian who speaks your audience’s language?
If only they had 20+ years of SEO experience, too…
I’m a freelance Italian SEO & web consultant (and AI Developer), helping businesses improve their visibility in the Italian search market. But that’s a pretty boring introduction, isn’t it? Let’s try something else…
4 questions to get us started
- What do I do? A lot of things, but here we’re focusing on Italian SEO services for businesses targeting the Italian market.
- Why me? I’m a native Italian, I’ve been working in SEO since 2006, and I bring together strong writing skills with solid coding and technical SEO knowledge.
- How do I work? With integrity and a long-term vision. I believe your success is my success, and I’d rather build sustainable results than chase shortcuts.
- How do we start? How about a Zoom (or WhatsApp, Google Meet, whatever works for you) call? Send me a message…
Italian SEO: more than keywords, tags and translations
Your business needs more than an Italian version of your website. It needs to be visible, relevant, and trustworthy to people searching in Italy. It needs to speak to my fellow Italians!
Just to lay down a few basic rules we need to agree on, here’s my “secret recipe” for your Italian SEO success. (Secret? Not really.)
The recipe for your Italian SEO success
- Speak your audience’s language correctly and effectively.
This applies not only to your website, but also to everything you communicate in your name: advertising, social media, PR, and mentions across the web. - Create great content and provide clear answers to what Italians are searching for.
Today, that means both search engines and AI tools. And guess what? AI tools also draw on information found across the web, including search-indexed content. - Earn links and mentions from Italian websites your audience trusts.
I don’t do link building in the old-fashioned sense. For years now, the better approach has been to think more like a PR professional: earn attention, build relationships, and give relevant websites a reason to talk about you. - Understand the people you’re talking to: not just their language, but their culture.
Translation isn’t just about choosing the right words. Words carry different connotations—positive or negative—and belong to semantic fields that don’t always overlap across cultures. A word, expression, or concept that works in one market may fall flat or send the wrong message in another. - Put someone in charge who knows what they’re doing.
That would be me. 😉
My point is: your Italian SEO campaign shouldn’t be improvised or left to chance. It needs experience, expertise, and a strategy built around your business and the people you want to reach.
Shall we get started?
Just a quick ‘about me’: experience that crosses borders
I’ve been working in SEO since October 2006, with a background in Communications and a Master’s in Digital Writing. After working with a couple of web agencies in Italy, I moved to Sydney, where I spent four years at an advertising agency before becoming a freelancer.
Since then, I’ve worked with international businesses across e-commerce, tourism, education, and others, helping them reach Italian-speaking audiences in markets from the UK and Ireland to Malta and Australia and all around the world.
No agency between us
I’m an independent SEO consultant. That means you work directly with the person doing the work: me.
No account managers passing messages back and forth, no layers of bureaucracy. Just a direct working relationship, with the flexibility and personal attention that comes with it.
Reports and meetings have their place, but they can also slow things down. We may need them, of course, but let’s keep them agile, focused, and purposeful. They should be tools that help us work better together, not processes that get in the way of getting things done.
SEO is a craft, not an assembly line. And while a structured organization may be the right choice for a large company with more complex needs, working with an independent specialist can offer a more personal, flexible, and suitable approach for some businesses.
SEO? Yes, but with integrity.
Back in the day, there were two kinds of SEO professionals:
- those selling one-size-fits-all SEO packages (“5 keywords on the first page of Google for XXX euros”)
- and those focusing on what their clients actually needed.
I’ve always tried to be the second kind. That means looking beyond rankings and keyword counts to what really matters: growing your business, turning visitors into customers, spotting new opportunities, and measuring success against return on investment.
Two principles guide my work:
- Results come first. SEO should contribute to your business goals. Results may take time, and success can’t always be measured by keyword rankings alone. We should know what we’re working towards—whether that’s more leads, clients, or sales—and measure our progress.
- Opportunities don’t stop at SEO. If I spot something beyond the scope of our campaign or traditional SEO that could benefit your business, I’ll bring it to your attention. That might mean exploring new channels, content opportunities, or other online marketing strategies.
My job isn’t to sell you a predefined package. It’s to help you find the right opportunities and make the most of them.
SEO keeps evolving, and so does my work. Keywords, data, and content remain fundamental, but success also depends on what happens beyond your website: creating content worth sharing, earning visibility across the web, and giving visitors a good reason to stay and become customers.
These aren’t just SEO tactics. They’re good practices for your business. Whatever Google decides next, these are things you should be doing to promote your business anyway. The web keeps changing (AI answers are just the latest twist), so it’s wise to diversify your marketing efforts rather than depend on a single source of traffic.
SEO in Italy
SEO has been declared dead many times. I first heard it back in 2006, when I was starting out. Since then, SEO has changed. Many times. Now AI is shaking things up again.
But some principles have never changed.
- Being visible matters. Call it SEO, search visibility, or whatever you like. It’s a race: there’s only one number-one spot, and if you’re in a competitive industry, chances are you want it too. If you’ve built a business, you deserve to reach the audience that’s right for you. Ultimately, what matters is that your business gets found by the people looking for what you offer.
- That’s what search engines—and now AI tools—are trying to do, too: provide the best answers to their users’ questions and problems. When your business is the right answer, you deserve to be there in their results. But that might not be enough. Sometimes, they just need a little help recognizing your business as the best answer for their users.
Of course, having the best website, landing page, or online service doesn’t automatically put you first in search results. Visibility takes work. The good news? There are plenty of legitimate ways to improve it, without resorting to tricks that could get you into trouble.
The same principles apply internationally, but every market has its own peculiarities. Italian users may favor different platforms, respond differently to certain communication styles, and have different expectations. Even outreach opportunities vary by industry: a technique that works well in one market may be impractical in another. Understanding these differences is how you turn a generic SEO strategy into one that works for Italy.
My Italian SEO Services
Here’s a list of what I can do for you—not an exhaustive one:
Content Marketing
Content marketing is about creating useful content that attracts the right audience, earns their trust, and helps turn their interest into business. For the Italian market, that means more than translating what you already have: it means creating content that speaks to Italian readers, answering their questions, and getting it in front of them—on your website and beyond.
From Italian articles published on relevant websites to content for your own pages and a strategy built around what your audience actually searches for, the goal is the same: make your content work for your business.
A content marketing campaign might start with keywords: those uncovered by the ancient and noble art of keyword research, or those related to the messages you want to spread. But remember how we started this page: great SEO starts with listening.
So, first listen to your audience—even through the keywords and questions hidden in your own private data in Google Search Console (more on that below). Then respond with the best answers: useful content that meets their needs and helps your business reach its goals. And that’s how we get you heard.
Italian articles that earn their place
Publishing articles on other sites used to be a link-building trick: write fast, publish anywhere, count the links. Google stopped rewarding that years ago, and it can still get a site penalised.
What works is the opposite. One good article, on an Italian site your customers actually read, brings real visitors and makes your brand known. And in 2026, those mentions can also help your brand gain visibility in AI-generated answers.
I write the article in Italian, carrying your message, not just your words, and I pitch it to the right Italian sites and blogs. We measure traffic and brand searches, not link counts. The rankings tend to follow (assuming the other SEO fundamentals are in place). But here are a few principles we need to agree upon:
- Quality, not quantity. Quantity is easier to measure, but as the saying goes, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” So we choose what’s best in the long term, not what makes a nice number on an invoice.
- Useful first. Every article has to solve a problem or answer a real question for your audience. No more “10 ways to lace your shoes”.
- Honest placements. If an article is paid for, it’s labelled as sponsored, and its links marked as such. Hiding it is exactly what gets brands into trouble.
- Patience. One good article won’t move the needle overnight. A few, on the right sites, build up over time.
Italian writing for your own website
Search engines used to reward keywords placed in the right tags, whatever the text around them said. That was long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Today they reward pages that actually help the people reading them, and so do AI search tools when they choose what to quote.
So I don’t just translate your articles and pages. I rewrite them for Italian readers: their culture, their humour, the jargon of your niche. Writing for a screen is different from writing for paper (I wrote my thesis on it), and writing for Italians is different from writing for anyone else. And nowadays we could add: writing for humans is different… from copy-pasting the output of a well-prompted AI chat.
AI translation is fast and usually correct. What it misses is the choice: which word your Italian customer would use, which sentence would make them trust you.
AI text creation is usually… just text. Filling a blank page that only bots will read. What it misses is the spark: what makes copy tick, what inspires, what makes communication brilliant instead of dull. Human ingenuity.
Fair warning: this is good stuff, and as it happens it doesn’t come cheap. Yet, there’s a difference between price and value: price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Italian content strategy: fishing, not hunting
Most SEO strategies, and most clients, start by hunting: pick the most competitive keywords and chase them. In a market you don’t know yet, that’s a slow and expensive way to go.
I prefer fishing. We start from what your Italian customers need to know, how they search, which words they use. We publish great content around it, and cast it like a net in the open sea. Then we see what we catch. Google Search Console tells us which questions bring people in, which pages Google and AI search tools pick up. That’s your own private data: not the public numbers in your favorite SEO tool, which your competitors are watching too! It’s your secret, waiting to be discovered. And we build on that.
One condition: your site comes first. No content can make up for a website people land on and leave. If that’s the case, we fix it before we fish.
Italian keyword research: the words your customers actually use
Keywords are what people type, or now ask, when they look for what you sell. Translating your English keywords is the quickest way to get them wrong: the dictionary gives you a correct word, not necessarily the one Italians search for. The same need can take a different word, a different nuance or a different intent in Italian, and that’s where campaigns are won or lost.
So I research your keywords in Italian, from scratch: which words your customers use, what they mean by them, and which ones bring business rather than just traffic. Everything else starts here: your pages, the articles, the content strategy. And if you run Google Ads in Italy, the same research feeds your ads transcreation.
Some Interesting Questions (and Answers)
How do you help international businesses connect with the Italian market?
Working with international clients for years has taught me how to bridge the gap between Italian language and culture and the expectations of businesses operating across markets.
That means adapting your SEO strategy to the Italian audience: avoiding unintended double meanings and negative connotations, and making sure nothing gets lost in translation, while leveraging the unique characteristics of Italian culture—all without losing sight of your broader business goals.
Which search engine do Italians use?
Mostly Google, by a long way. Bing and other search engines account for a much smaller share of the Italian market. But search is no longer limited to traditional search engines: people also use AI tools such as ChatGPT, while Google increasingly includes AI-generated answers in its results.
My job is to help your business get found where your potential customers are searching.
Can you help only with Italian SEO?
Italian is my native language, but I’m also fluent in English. I can handle technical SEO, metadata, keyword research, and copywriting in both languages. My Spanish is functional: I can manage the technical side, metadata, and keyword research, but for Spanish content, I’d recommend working with a native copywriter.
Can you help with multilingual SEO campaigns?
I’ve occasionally coordinated multilingual campaigns with native-speaking specialists. See my services for more details.