Italian SEO
Hire an Italian Specialist for your SEO & Online marketing campaigns in Italy
SEO & Online Marketing in Italy is different: different language, different market, different users and different opportunities in terms of SEO and ROI.
I am a freelance Italian SEO & Online Marketing consultant who is highly qualified to take your business to the next level by optimizing your website in the current Italian Search Market. I have been working in SEO since October 2006 with a background in Communications and a Master’s in Digital Writing. I worked with a couple of web agencies in Italy (with one of the best Italian marketing consultants) and then I moved to Australia, where I worked for an advertising agency in Sydney for 4 years. I became a freelancer in Sydney, until I decided to leave Australia and explore other countries.
Along the way, I’ve worked with e-commerce sites, tourism businesses and English schools from London to Dublin, Malta and Australia, all looking for Italian customers.
I’m not an SEO company, I’m not an SEO agency
What does that mean? It means you don’t pay for the costs of a company or an agency, such as rent, employees’ wages and bills. I work from home, wherever home may be. SEO is a craft, not an industrial business. Agencies are not bad: if you are in charge of the marketing of a big company, an agency may well be the right choice. For most businesses, though, a good SEO professional is more cost-effective and more personal: you work directly with the person doing the work.
Even back in the day, there were two kinds of SEO guys:
- those selling packages (“5 keywords for XXX euros”),
- and those focused on what their clients actually needed.
I’ve always done my best to stick with the second kind: exploring new keywords to grow the business, making sure the pages turn visitors into customers, keeping an eye out for new opportunities, and measuring everything against the return on investment. In other words:
- let me first focus on ROI (we should get results, maybe in the long term, but we should get them);
- allow me to keep an open eye on every opportunity that might come out in the web landscape and that could benefit you as my client, even if it’s not strictly SEO or if it involves other online marketing strategies.
Over the years, as Google changed, my job changed as well, sometimes to embrace an overall online marketing strategy, sometimes to work alongside other professionals. I still come from an SEO perspective (keywords, data and content are still the basis of online success), but I’ve embraced other techniques, such as:
- Content Marketing (which for some is what SEO has become)
- Content Promotion (which is a smarter way to evolve “old” link building techniques)
Indeed some would say that today, for SEO success, you should also have:
- great content (you can call it content implementation, content marketing…)
- web popularity (as a result of great content and content promotion)
- more than effective user interaction (as a result of a website well designed)
Whatever Google decides next, this is what you should do to promote your business anyway: the web keeps changing (AI answers are just the latest twist), so you had better diversify your marketing efforts and not depend on a single source of traffic.
SEO in Italy
If we consider the bigger picture of what a search engine wants from your website, things don’t change much for the Italian market compared to the English one, or the one you are used to.
- Search Engines aim to provide their users with the best service;
- if your website or webpage is designed to provide users with the best answer for a specific set of queries…
you are on the right road to SEO success!
Of course, publishing the best website/landing page/online service ever doesn’t mean – unfortunately – that you will be first in search engines (for relevant keywords) straightaway: the system needs a little push (and that can be done in a number of clean ways, without using “tricks” that would get you into trouble).
This is true for the international markets as well as the Italian one.
But of course the Italian market has its own peculiarities:
- Google.it might work slightly differently compared to other language versions of Google;
- Websites are different and you might not be able to rely on some techniques (e.g. guest blogging might not be possible in your niche);
- Italian users might love some social networks and completely ignore others you might feel comfortable with;
- Italian users are different and might respond unexpectedly to certain styles of communication (and that might affect their behaviour in the Search Engine Results Pages).
Which search engine do Italians use?
Mostly Google, by a long way: Bing and the others share the crumbs. But searching in Italy no longer means only typing into google.it. More and more Italians ask ChatGPT, or read Google’s AI answer before they get to the blue links. And new features often reach Italy later than the US, so what you read about google.com isn’t always true here yet. My job is to make sure your website shows up in both places: in the results, and in the answers.
So, if you want to explore new opportunities in the Italian market, you obviously need to rely on someone who is not only an Italian native speaker but also a Search Marketing Specialist… that of course, would be me!
So, let me tell you how you can benefit from my services:
- First, I am an Italian native speaker and a pretty good copywriter.
I’m proficient in English as well, so we can talk on a video call or by email without any misunderstanding.
By the way, something funny happens to Italians living abroad for a while: they start speaking strangely, including words and structures from their second language. Since, as a copywriter, I’m quite attentive to language, your message will be delivered to your Italian audience in the best way, avoiding the mistakes that non-professional writers would make. - Second, I have been an SEO & Online Marketing specialist since October 2006, and I’ve been specialising in Italian campaigns for my international clients.
The web landscape in Italy is different, so you need someone who knows what he’s doing and which are the best ways to reach potential traffic for your Italian website and grow your business. - Third, I focus on ROI… and even better, on long-term ROI.
I just like to do the best for my clients, which means I will always do and suggest what is best for you, according to my knowledge and expertise. Some might work to make you happy in the short term, maybe using tricks that could jeopardize your website, and thus your business; I prefer to work for the long run, even if this means waiting a little longer for results, while keeping your business safe.
My Italian SEO Services
Here’s a list, probably not exhaustive, of what I can do for you:
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 it does one more thing: AI search tools learn which brands to recommend from where those brands are mentioned.
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. 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 does good 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.
Need more than Italian? A multilingual SEO campaign
I’ve occasionally coordinated multilingual campaigns with native-speaking specialists: see Services.