Here's a smart thing I did to reclaim lost traffic from ChatGPT


Story time πŸ₯

(plus practical tips on how you can recover YOUR traffic from LLMs too)

First, why was my traffic 'lost'?
​
Well, I noticed that ChatGPT would sometimes link to my Tech SEO Pro course with the wrong URL:
​
It was sending traffic to

techseopro(.)com​
​
instead of
​
​techseo(.)pro​
​
The wrong domain just returned an error, as it was never set up.
​
BUT! I actually owned it from the beginning for marketing purposes (you gotta be proactive when building big things πŸ˜‰)
​
So I set up a redirect from techseopro(.)com to techseo(.)pro. And I added UTMs to track it with a campaign=techseoprocom-domain (an analytics nerd forever).
​
This is the traffic I've received so far 🀩

Smart, right?
​
It took just 5 minutes. And I reclaimed free traffic.
​
​(Btw, most traffic from ChatGPT is coming to the right domain, and it's growing every month. This was just another way to own my course's brand).

So here are the things you can do to reclaim traffic for your domain from not-found pages (a little bit different from my example, but the logic is the same)

1. Identify any LLM traffic coming to your 404 pages

Use your Analytics platform and search these pages by the Title tag (e.g. 'Not Found', depending on which one you're using).

2. Find any consistent traffic patterns

1 or 2 visits don't count. Look for significant numbers happening over a period of time. It will signal that the problem is persistent.

3. Redirect to the best-matching existing pages

Find the existing pages matching the user intent and set up redirects to them.

4.* Bonus points for using a feedback loop

If you can trigger an LLM answer containing the wrong URL to your website, use the feedback loop to tell the LLM the right URL to use. They do listen.

(This is a tip I learned from Crystal Carter, our speaker in the SEO for LLMs course 😎)

Reply and let me know if you've found such error pages on the websites you're working on.

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