When localizing your online content for the Italian market, SEO – or Search Engine Optimization – is one of the most important activities to consider. In particular, thanks to an SEO translation, your Italian content will be more easily found online.

If you already have an SEO strategy in place in your own language, don’t make the mistake of thinking the job is done. In fact, it is not enough to simply translate a list of keywords from English to Italian: SEO translation for Italian content is a complex activity, which requires specific skills.

In this article, I will explain the most important aspects and common mistakes of Italian SEO and I will tell you why it is important to get the help of a professional Italian translator if you want to properly localize your SEO content.

​What is Italian SEO?

When we talk about SEO translation for Italian content, we primarily refer to the activity of optimizing online texts (websites, blogs, social media posts, advertising campaigns, etc.) for the Italian market. Italian SEO is not merely the translation of the SEO analysis and keywords originally performed in another language. In fact, the Italian translation of SEO content takes into consideration many more aspects beyond linguistics.

First of all, the search engines most commonly used in Italy might affect your SEO strategy: in Italy, almost 96% of users search for their online content through Google, with Bing earning a distant second place, so you should correctly focus on the first one.

Secondly, the SEO translation of your content should take Italian culture into consideration. That is to say, you need to understand what and how your Italian prospects are searching for online. What’s more, you should keep an eye on the contextualization of even the smallest details: don’t forget to provide the proper localization elements, such as currencies and units of measurement.

Last but not least, properly localizing SEO content requires a deep understanding of the Italian language your clients are speaking right now and only an Italian native speaker can help you with this.

​Why it‘s important to have your SEO content translated into Italian by a native speaker

As a professional translator, I’ve seen this mistake over and over again: the client sends me a list of keywords to translate or, even worse, to review after an automatic translation.

Choosing to simply perform a translation (even an automatic one) of the SEO keywords might seem an affordable choice: after all, keywords are just strings of words, with no complex sentences or meaning! However, this kind of approach does not consider the search intent of Italian clients. Put simply, you might be overlooking the real terms Italians use when they look for information.

For example, you might want to work on the SEO translation of the content for a lakeside resort. It’s just two words, so let’s put it into Google Translate! And here is the English to Italian translation you will get:

Now, let’s have a look at its back-translation from Italian to English. The back-translation reads “location on the lake”.

This is not wrong per se, it might actually be used as an Italian translation in a different context. However, an Italian person looking for a romantic getaway by the lake is more likely to search for “resort sul lago”, using a commonly accepted English term.

In fact, in Italian, there are many occurrences where, sometimes recently, foreign words have replaced the existing Italian terms. It’s important to be aware of these preferences of the speaking public to make sure that the words used in online marketing material do not read as obsolete.

So, always keep in mind that SEO translation into Italian requires keyword analysis and a translation based on the search purposes of Italian users.

​More than keywords: optimizing your SEO translation

In conclusion, the SEO translation strategy for your Italian content should be well-rounded: working on the Italian keywords of your copy is important but should be only one of the steps.

Don’t forget that Google’s algorithm is becoming increasingly evolved and monitors user behavior. That is to say, the quality of your website is being judged on many different factors, for example how long people are staying on your site. As a consequence, you need to provide your users with content that feels natural and is pleasant to read.

A professional translator will make sure that all your marketing materials are consistently translated into Italian across your website pages, blog posts, and social media content, and will make your Italian SEO translation much more effective.

If you want to localize your online content for the Italian market, don’t forget SEO translation. Write me an email, I can help you evaluate the quality of your existing translations and help with all your Italian translation and copywriting needs!