Ian Nuttall: a thread of his most useful SEO content - with each original thread in full

How to rank and get more traffic from ChatGPT (full guide)

Why:

- I get 6,000+ visits a month on my test site (+99% increase)
- 80%+ of all LLM traffic is from ChatGPT (via @DataChaz)
- LLM conversion rate is much higher than organic search (via @jeff_weinstein)

How:

1/ Make sure your content is actually available to LLMs

If you use Lovable, Replit, Bolt, or any other frontend site builder that uses CSR (client side rendering) you likely won’t appear in ChatGPT results. SSR (server side rendering) is very important for ChatGPT.

Also check that your robots.txt file doesn’t block the following user agents:

- ChatGPT-User
- OAI-SearchBot
- GPTBot

2/ Focus on being indexed (and ranking well) in Bing

ChatGPT has that Microsoft hookup so you want to be as visible and rank as high as possible there.

- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
- Add your XML sitemap(s) to BWT
- Add your sitemap(s) to a robots.txt file as well

Use IndexNow to automatically tell Bing about your URLs to speed up the indexing process.

3/ Add structured data to increase on-page signals

It makes sense that adding JSON+LD structured data would help AI agents to figure out what content is relevant and worth showing.

It hasn’t been proven yet in case studies whether this makes a difference but adding FAQPage schema, HowTo, and others as needed will give the model structured answers that help it understand which documents to recommend.

4/ You still need to follow simple SEO best practice

80% of SEO is just doing the very basic, simple stuff. We want to rank in Bing as a proxy to ChatGPT so that is still needed to get the best results.

- Simple, focused title tag and description
- User-friendly H1 (while still getting the keyword/topic in)
- Simple H2/H3 structure
- Good internal links

5/ Add freshness signals to your content

Part of the algorithm or thinking of ChatGPT is around the freshness of the content and it will promote documents that seem to be more recent or contain fresh information.

Include information in titles or the content about “Last updated” dates using proper time HTML tags or add the current year (only if applicable).

6/ Building backlinks and mentions carry a lot of weight

If 80% of SEO is just doing the basics very well, the final 20% is pretty much just backlinks. (yes some technical SEOs will be cursing me right now)

Ranking in ChatGPT means backlinks actually don’t matter as much as mentions because these models can search the web for the brand name to find your site.

Focus on being mentioned by providing expert quotes on journalist requests like Help A Reporter Out or use cold outreach to be featured in industry roundups.

7/ ChatGPT loves to recommend articles with data and statistics

Original data is always in demand and ChatGPT seems geared towards wanting to find sources with data that it can cite. Which means sharing studies or analysis from public datasets will get surfaced more in searches.

This actually leads on nicely to my next point because data is very useful for building programmatic SEO features on your site…

8/ Long tail programmatic SEO content does VERY WELL in ChatGPT

In Google, people type “best seo course” and click the top results. But in ChatGPT it’s often a lot more contextual and conversational:

“I’m a saas founder building {product}. We have a 3 person team but no marketing person. How can we learn to get our product found better in Google?”

Your content needs to contain a lot of this contextual stuff, and programmatic SEO is a way to do that at scale in an automated and high quality way.

9/ Add content pages to your site that ChatGPT will be looking for

Make sure you have a lot of pages that talk about bottom of the funnel topics like the features (and more importantly the benefits) of your product, who it’s for, what pain points that audience has, and the prices you offer.

Also make sure to add a support page because ChatGPT loves to reference them.

This also explains why Jeff is hearing stuff like this:

Just off the phone with a growth person from a major internet company: ~"We're seeing much higher conversion rates from prospective users coming from organic LLM traffic versus organic search."

10/ Parasite SEO is little known trick to get ChatGPT to mention you

TLDR; parasite SEO is where you use the authority of another established website to rank for competitive keywords by publishing content there instead of your own site.

In the context of ranking in ChatGPT this works incredibly well because the parasite SEO site you publish on will likely rank high in Bing and Google.

That article references your product with mentions and a link. ChatGPT goes “okay, this article ranks for ‘best seo course` and mentions {product}, I should dig into this”

Two of the best parasite SEO platforms right now to try this on are Medium, and reddit.

This reminds me of the multi-tier SEO linkwheels from back in the day. IYKYN 😂

Got any other good tips for getting traffic from ChatGPT? Getting more than 6,000 visits a month? Think I'm wrong about some (or all) of this?

Let me know in the comments ;)

From January to June, I increased sessions on this site by ~247% and went from $0 to $2.5k a month in earnings.

Here's the playbook of how I did it using programmatic SEO, AI, Google Search Console and good ol' blog content:

1. Programmatic SEO for topical authority

Most of my projects start with pSEO because I can launch a lot of pages very quickly, on related topics, to jumpstart the topical authority of the site.

I had a dictionary of terms for the niche to use for this particular site.

SHAMELESS PLUG:

If you want to learn how to use programmatic SEO for topical authority, I have a course that walks you through how to do it in WordPress or using code 👇

practicalprogrammatic.com

2. Leveraging AI

These pages were incredibly thin to start with (maybe 100 words max) and after a couple of months to get them indexed, I wanted to expand and make them better.

I wrote (a bit) about the process here:

x.com/iannuttall/sta…

The TLDR is that I took the existing definitions and asked ChatGPT to give me:

- History and meaning of the definition
- A list of 5 examples of the phrase in use
- Terms that are similar to it (for internal linking)

I prefer to use AI content this way by giving it a lot of context and data to work from.

IMO it returns much better results than simply giving it prompts and letting it try to figure it out.

3. Blog content

Now that I had my base site of ~2.5k pages live and indexed I wanted to piggyback that authority by creating topical blog posts.

With my expert writer from Upwork, I added 10-15 posts a month on topics closely related to the definitions.

I also added some non-topical articles with a lot of search volume just to see how they would perform. YOLO!

As always, I indexed these posts using IndexMeNow:

indexmenow.com/en/#ae243

4. GSC-fu

By April, the site was starting to hit around 800 visitors daily, earning RPMs of $40+ on Raptive.

I dived into GSC to see what terms I was ranking for, whether they could be new blog posts, or the page didn't contain those phrases and could be updated.

I also shared a video of how you can use regex in GSC to do this yourself. If you're on WordPress then Query Hunter by @fatjoedavies is a great option too.

x.com/iannuttall/sta…

5. New blog posts

There were lots of keywords that existing content ranked for that was outside the scope of the article that ranked.

I could have added a new section, but I got my writer to create posts solely to answer these queries and internal links from the ranking page.

6. Updating existing content

When a new blog post wasn't needed I added new sections to the existing content and updated H2 headings.

This increase in topical coverage boosted the rankings of the pages.

7. Internal linking tips

Nobody talks about this, but I assume we all have the same problem.

When you create topical clusters that all need to be linked back to each other, it's a pain in the arse!

You might miss out on internal links to content that hasn't been published yet.

To solve this, once a cluster is written and published and indexed, I hire a VA to go through all of the content and create a Google Sheet of internal link recommendations.

This CSV will contain the blog post to link from, the post to link to, and the text to link.

I have a script that will run through the entire sheet and update all posts with the internal links, but you can also do this manually if your site is in WordPress.

This makes sure that I don't miss any key internal links and everything is connected in a way that makes sense!

8. Next steps - topical dominance!

I'll admit, my content strategy is haphazard at best. I tend to "play it by ear" and don't often have a strategic topical map.

So I bought a topical map from @yoyaoh.

Once that is complete, I'll be looking to add 100k+ words of new content 🔥

And that's it! Follow me @iannuttall for more threads like this.

Hit the like/retweet on the first tweet below if you can 🙏

If you like this tweet, you'll love Playbooks, my email newsletter for online business owners + solopreneurs.

Join Playbooks here:

iann.ck.page/playbooks

SEO tip: Writing more content around the long-tail keywords you already rank for can 10x your traffic.

In this video, I'll show you a couple of regex queries you can use to find them - no paid tools needed.

Double down on what's working and create better topical clusters 👇

To find queries over 60 characters in length:

^[\w\W\s\S]{60,}$

To find queries 7 or more words in length:

(\w+\s){7,}\w+

Beep, boop, this is an auto-plug (which means this tweet did well)

I share more SEO tips and tricks in my email newsletter sent to 1,700+ smart marketers like you.

Sign up below if you want more like this =)

ian.is/newsletter/

I run a $20,000/mo programmatic SEO business.

With 0 employees.

Here's how to do it:

1/ Get very good at finding repeatable head terms and modifiers

Keyword research is similar to fundamental SEO, except we're looking for repeatable patterns.

Start with your head terms and look for modifiers that can create a lot of very specific, long-tail keywords.

So if "best beach" is our head term, there are many modifiers we could use to create a pSEO site around it:

best beach 𝗶𝗻 {𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆}
best beach 𝗶𝗻 {𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆}
etc

You can also get fancy and combine modifiers:

best 𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘆 beach 𝗶𝗻 {𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆}
best beach 𝗶𝗻 {𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆} with 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴

Bonus: each programmatic SEO section of your site is a ready-made topical cluster. This is how I'm able to rank brand-new domains very quickly.

2/ Get smart with your internal linking

Every page on your site should be reachable from the homepage with 2-3 clicks.

So with the beach example, you could have a list of beaches in the same city, interlinking them in your template.

One advanced tactic I use with location-based pSEO is to get your trigonometry on. Using a formula, I can find locations near a given latitude and longitude, within a certain number of miles.

This can find locations outside of the current city to surface more internal links.

To make your pages reachable within 3 clicks, here's an outline of what I would do for a beach site:

1. Home page links to every country
2. Every country page links to every city
3. Every city page links to every beach

Every beach is within 3 clicks of the home page!

Another slightly advanced internal linking tactic is dynamic sidebars.

This can be done easily with code, and WordPress has plugins to help with this too.

Sidebars can link to random countries, cities, or beaches, or you can track popular locations and list those - or both!

3/ Leverage aged sites whenever possible

If you're just starting out, free-to-reg domains are fine to test the theories. The most explosive pSEO growth I've had, though, is when combined with an aged domain 𝗮𝗹𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲!

Not to toot my own horn, but I built AgedAssets.com to help you do this very thing.

This has been my go-to strategy for years and my most recent ~$500k exit came from a $2k domain acquired just like this!

What you're looking for here is a site that is:

- No longer updated
- Has solid SEO metrics (backlinks, some traffic + rankings)
- Is in a niche that has repeatable keywords (see point 1)

This trifecta can help you to hit the ground very, very quickly. Here's my $2k site:

I prefer aged sites to aged domains for a few reasons:

- Aged domains fall out of the index and it's not always possible to get old rankings back
- You can leverage the existing content without having to rewrite it
- You already have data about what topics + keywords are ranking

4/ Spend as much time on templating as you do on data

One mistake I see a lot is getting amazing data then adding it to a very simplistic template.

Your templates should include conditional content, comparisons to other data where possible, and charts + tables!

I've spoken to people building pSEO sites in the same niches as me, often much more talented developers too, and yet my sites outperformed them...

Mostly because I took the extra effort to build a template that I thought was truly helpful to end users!

Even in tricky niches like unit conversions, where there isn't a lot to say beyond "hey, here's the answer", you can provide some context to try and grab clicks from people who need an explanation as well.

Not the prettiest example here, but it works.

5/ Get as many pages indexed as possible

I've been guilty in the past of going COMPLETELY OVERBOARD on page volume, but I've calmed down in my old age.

My indexing strategy now is:

- Focus on topical clusters of no more than ~2,000 pages at a time
- REALLY nail internal linking
- Target clusters that have useful (and enough) data to share
- Don't create pages purely based on keyword volume if the data doesn't work

I used to rely too heavily on massive, massive, volumes of XML sitemaps. My rule of thumb now:

𝗜𝗳 𝗜 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗽 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅, 𝗶𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀!

For the actual indexing part, a few more useful tips:

- Try and keep all sitemaps below 10,000 pages
- Create an XML sitemap
- Submit it to GSC
- Add it to robots.txt

And the final indexing tip: take your archive pages, so in the beach example this would be the country pages and maybe the city pages.

Submit those to an indexing tool like indexmenow.com and let Google index those pages, following your well-executed internal links!

6/ When you get traction, add blog posts + newsletter

pSEO is just one strategy for traffic acquisition. I use it because you can scale new or abandoned sites VERY QUICKLY.

This lets you know what works and what doesn't. With data, you can make decisions.

When you see what topics are ranking, you can plan out laser-focused blog posts to drill down further, hitting the high RPM keywords.

On top of that, you can add email newsletter forms to convert traffic to readers that you build a relationship with over time.

With AI on the rise, this is more important than ever!

In fact, I'm considering an exit on my pSEO sites that don't fit the long-term brand model that I'm looking to build.

If I can't see a path to move beyond display ads and SEO traffic, it's not viable long-term.

For me, that is going to look like this:

pSEO traffic -> email list -> digital products -> stable profits

And that's it!

If you want to learn the practical basics of programmatic SEO using WordPress, my video series is available again (with more videos coming soon!)

👇

practicalprogrammatic.com

I hope you've found this thread helpful.

Follow me @iannuttall for more.

Like/Retweet the first tweet below if you geek out on pSEO too:

My programmatic SEO portfolio gets 80+ million impressions and 1+ million clicks a month - on autopilot

So... here's everything I know about programmatic SEO in 2025 (for the last time)

Don't bother with a thread unroller, I published it all here for you with some extra details

(just don't forget to come back and like/reply for the engagement!)

practicalprogrammatic.com/blog/programma…

First off, programmatic SEO is still mostly just SEO

- Focused title tag and description
- User-friendly H1
- Good internal links
- No SEO slop
- XML sitemaps for all pages
- Build or buy backlinks

Sometimes I do images. Sometimes I add charts and tables.
But not often.

What really matters for long term SEO success is actually taking the time and effort to create something that's genuinely useful.

Pro tip: new niches (like MCP servers 😉) work well for early adopters

If you don't know what programmatic SEO is yet, before you continue, read this post

practicalprogrammatic.com/blog/what-is-p…

"But Manus can search and build directory sites in minutes"
"ChatGPT can write me 100,000 posts on every single topic"

Manus needs a data source to scrape from and AI slop doesn't rank.

Neither work well RIGHT NOW - there is still a lot of opportunity

My course examples focus on blog posts, but SEO has changed.

SEO blog content does not work any more UNLESS you already have a very well established site with a lot of authority.

But the principles I teach don't change:

Keyword research
I don't spend much time on keyword research. Just focus on patterns:

- seo agencies in {city}
- {product1} vs {product2}
- {competitor} alternatives
- average salary for {profession}
- cheap flights from {from} to {to}
- ai {topic} photos

You get the idea...

Data collection
Getting data is so easy now - I recommend scraping or building your own

For my MCP directory I gave Cursor example URLs, it fetched the HTML, found the elements, and built the scraper.

I rarely use data sources for new projects, it's all AI powered scrapers!

User-generated content is a goldmine too. Check out @pontusab who built cursor.directory with rules mostly submitted by the community

This type of data is very hard for competitors to replicate

I've mentioned that blog content no longer works.
Nobody cares if your {cat|dog|rabbit|wombat} can eat blueberries!

Here's what does work:

- Product landing pages (comparisons, alternatives, etc)
- Tools (e.g flight times and prices)
- Directory listings (like MCP servers)

Directories are actually interesting and in some ways untapped

You can rank for up and coming brands that don't get searched yet, but will once they scale.

MCP keywords and search volume don't even register yet - but they will soon...

You can also target more valuable bottom of funnel keywords with directories too

- mydirectory.test/{brand} (main listing)
- mydirectory.test/{brand}/alternatives (comparisons)
- mydirectory.test/{brand}/reviews (validation)

@ProductHunt crushes at this

programmatic seo != spam

(despite what google might say)

but I no longer recommend building huge sites with 10k, 100k, or millions of pages.

Here's what I recommend now for scale and indexing:

- Less than 10,000 pages unless you REALLY need more
- Create XML sitemaps and submit to GSC (obvious)
- Add sitemaps to robots.txt

If you do have a huge site, limit your sitemaps to 10k URLs ((yes, even though the limit is 50k - limiting this helps with crawling)

I think the true power of programmatic SEO is to help you automate publishing and indexing a smaller amount of pages that will actually convert - whatever that means for you.

pSEO is at least 10x faster than traditional content marketing.

Most common problems are actually common SEO problems and not specific to pSEO:

- Slow crawl speeds
- Duplicate content
- Thin content
- Keyword cannibalisation

To improve crawling and indexing:

- Publish all content (don't drip-publish)
- Add internal links (breadcrumbs, sidebar, etc)
- Every page should be findable within 3 clicks
- Use @TheURLMonitor* (it still works!)

*fun fact: I built it, scaled to $100k arr and sold for $250k

Do you get penalised for duplicate pSEO content? No.

As long as your pages target different keywords in the title, H1, and throughout the page, it doesn't matter if your template is 80% the same across pages.

Most of my old sites are Madlibs for content. But not the new ones...

With AI you can (and should) create unique content for each page.

If you give AI a lot of context, data, and examples of the output you want, you no longer need to manually build templates.

For my MCP directory of 3,000+ servers I think it cost me $40 using Sonnet 3.7.

If you have a bunch of pages on your site that target the same keyword, Google can't figure out which one to rank, so ranks neither.

Let's say you have this page:
yoursite.test/programmatic-seo

You add a tag with the same name:
yoursite.test/blog/tag/programmatic-seo

This could be an issue since both are focused on the same keyword.

In that situation it's better to have a non-public way of tagging your articles.

- pay attention to keywords and public URLs
- that includes synonyms (pick one canonical keyword and use that)

This is the blueprint for success with programmatic SEO going forward and AI is making it easier than ever - but you still have to put the work in

It's hard work to make it look this easy...

Hit reply if you have any questions and I'll answer them in the thread!

Did you know that programmatic SEO can create topical authority VERY quickly?

Here's an example of how you can use simple keyword research to map out a topical cluster:

Let's say you collected a bunch of data about scuba diving in various locations:

- best beaches
- different tour guides
- prices
- interesting facts per location
- sea temperatures
- best time of year to visit
- etc etc

First thing to do is throw "scuba diving" into Low Fruits:

Not using Low Fruits? I've been using it as my go-to resource for finding repeatable programmatic keywords and topical clusters (their clustering seems to work just fine for me without being too overwhelming!).

Sign up here (not an aff link!):

lowfruits.io

So right off the bat, I can see a bunch of location-specific keywords like:

- scuba diving maui
- hawaii scuba diving
- florida scuba diving
- you get the gist

These would be my pillar pages and we'll stick to one country for now - US state and city level.

This gives us the pattern: "Scuba Diving in {location}" and we can use basically the same template for both state and city level.

This needs to be an absolute barn burner of a pillar post. We take all the data and build a template that includes:

- a map of the location (city level, or at state level a map of cities to click)
- lots of info about the local weather currently, historically for the current day/month
- information on tide times + sea temps
- a directory of local guides & scuba tours

This is pSEO 101, but...

𝗪𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲.

In the PAA we can see that the questions are around data we already collected!

This means we can create new programmatic SEO templates to target these terms:

- where is the best place to dive in {location}
- what time of the year is best to dive in {location}
- how much does it cost to dive in {location}

When I build out sites like this, my pillar post is heavily focused on the data and contains charts and tables, maps, and other interactive elements.

This type of content is fantastic for getting natural backlinks!

For the cluster posts, I go for a traditional blog post style.

In the related searches, there are even more options for long-tail cluster keywords that leverage the exact same data in multiple different ways - all linking back to that pillar page.

I also use latitude and longitude to find + internal link to nearby locations!

The beauty of pSEO for this is that not only can you cover a huge topical map fast, but if you've built the project well (i.e. not relying 100% on WP All Import plugin!) then you 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻!

Updates to the original data source roll out automatically to all pages that reference it, which means the page you wrote about "Where is the best place to scuba dive in Maui" is constantly showing the correct information based on the data!

If you're a smart cookie you probably ALSO realised that you can also have different affiliate offers, email opt-ins, and digital guidebooks that you can promote to the right people at the right time 🤯

All from one location. Switch affiliate program? One change + it's sitewide!

If this kind of thing is interesting to you, I cover things like this in my programmatic SEO course. Let me know what you want to learn and I will try to create content for it!

practicalprogrammatic.com

I'm seeing big programmatic SEO wins in ecom and digital products.

Example: @benrobertsonio is crushing it on colorbliss.

⛔ pSEO → display ads
✅ pSEO → products

Still the best way to scale IMO.

@benrobertsonio I'm a terrible marketer, btw. This was the perfect moment to mention my programmatic SEO course and I totally forgot.

practicalprogrammatic.com

SEO keyword research tip: sign up for the daily Google Trends Newsletter.

I skim-read this every day & always find new keyword ideas to explore. LOTS of programmatic SEO + AI options!

In this thread, I’ll cover a couple of interesting highlights from recent emails.

If you’re interested in SEO and internet business content like this, follow me @iannuttall and subscribe to my email newsletter:

ian.is/newsletter/

Mortgages and housing

Lots of long-tail keywords that stand out. Including:

- mortgage contract switching currency
- how does {x} affect mortgage rates
- how long after chapter 7 to buy a house?
- how to buy a house with no money and bad credit?

Composting and gardening

The eco-friendly product market is expected to hit ~$300bn by 2027. This section stood out, with keywords like "can you compost {x}":

• Bread
• Dog poop 💩
• Meat
• Paper towels
• Tea bags
• Rice
• Onion
• Weeds
• Egg shells
• Banana peels

More gardening keyword ideas:

1. What gardening zone am I in?
2. What is hydroponic gardening?
3. Is gardening exercise?
4. How much do gardeners make?
5. What is a garden window?

And another programmatic SEO option: "is {plant} a native plant?"

One of the case study sites I built in Practical Programmatic was in the golfing niche, and this was from the trends email from Monday. I gave that site away, but this gives me more ideas for programmatic + AI combinations 🤑

This email gets sent out daily and there are dozens of interesting opportunities and ideas in each one. Take the keywords, load them up in your fave SEO tool, and see where the rabbit hole takes you.

The signup link is here:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

If you find anything interesting, let me know! I love this stuff.

Follow @iannuttall, like and RT etc if you want more SEO tips like this.