How Wanderlust Abruzzo Reached #1 on ChatGPT — Starting from Zero

What does it look like when a brand-new website — zero domain authority, zero backlinks, zero existing audience — outranks established competitors on both Google and ChatGPT within six months?

This is that story.

Wanderlust Abruzzo is a relocation consultancy founded by Viviana Malva that helps English- and German-speaking expats navigate the practical and emotional challenges of moving to Abruzzo, Italy.

When Viviana came to me in late 2025, she had a clear vision for her service but no web presence.

No site, no content, no search footprint.

As of today, Wanderlust Abruzzo holds the #1 position on ChatGPT for the query “moving to Abruzzo services”, ranks 24 keywords in the top 3 positions on Google, and has converted two paying clients directly through the website — one of them arriving specifically via a ChatGPT recommendation.

Here is exactly how we got there.

The client: Viviana Malva and Wanderlust Abruzzo

Viviana Malva is the founder of Wanderlust Abruzzo — a relocation support service based in Abruzzo, Italy. Born in Germany to Italian parents, Viviana moved to Abruzzo herself a few years ago and built her business around the challenges she experienced firsthand: the bureaucracy, the language barrier, the isolation of making major life decisions without local support.

Her services cover everything from housing search and utility setup to codice fiscale applications, residency registration, and lifestyle orientation for newly arrived expats.

Her audience is international — primarily based in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — which meant the site needed to perform in English-language search globally, not just locally.

When we started working together, the brief was simple: build something that feels trustworthy, human, and genuinely helpful — and make sure the right people can find it.

The challenge: starting from zero in a competitive niche

Relocation services for expats moving to Italy is not an empty space.

Established competitors with years of content, backlinks, and brand recognition were already visible for the core search terms.

For a brand-new domain with no authority, competing head-on for high-volume keywords like “moving to Italy” or “expat relocation Italy” was not a realistic short-term strategy.

The real challenge was threefold:

1. Build a professional, conversion-ready site fast. Viviana’s audience — expats making one of the biggest decisions of their lives — needed to feel trust and warmth immediately. The design had to communicate “local, human, and reliable” without looking amateur or generic.
2. Create content that could rank despite zero domain authority. This meant being surgical with keyword targeting — focusing on long-tail, question-based, and geo-specific queries that larger competitors had overlooked or underserved.
3. Optimise for AI Answer Engines from day one. With ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews increasingly answering “moving to X” queries conversationally, being cited in those answers was at least as valuable as ranking in traditional search — possibly more so for an audience that researches major life decisions by asking questions, not just searching keywords.

The approach: what we built and why

The technical foundation

I built Wanderlust Abruzzo on WordPress, hosted on Hostinger, using Elementor and Royal Elementor Addons for the design.

The site launched in English with a German translation via TranslatePress, reflecting Viviana’s two primary target markets.

The structure was deliberately simple: Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact.

A clear, distraction-free conversion path on every page.

No unnecessary complexity, no bloated plugin stack.

Fast loading, mobile-first, technically clean from day one.

Core technical decisions included:

• properly configured hreflang tags for EN/DE
• a clean XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters
• and LocalBusiness schema markup to establish the entity clearly for search engines from launch

The content strategy

With no domain authority to leverage, content quality and search intent alignment were everything. I used SORO to generate research-backed first drafts for blog posts — a tool that structures content around real search data — and then edited each post manually to add:

• Viviana’s local knowledge
• specific Abruzzo context
• and the kind of practical detail that earns genuine trust from someone actually planning a move

Keyword Research

Keyword research was done with Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic, with a deliberate focus on three content types:

• Question-based queries: “how to get a codice fiscale in Italy”, “best places to live in Abruzzo for expats”, “where to live in Abruzzo”
• Geo-specific long-tail terms: phrases that larger Italy-focused competitors had not written about specifically enough
• Informational content structured for AI citation: detailed, factual, directly answering the questions expats actually ask

The AEO-first content structure

Every blog post was written with AI citation in mind.

This means:

• a clear, direct answer to the target question in the opening paragraph
• FAQ sections with explicit question-and-answer pairs
• specific data points and named locations that AI engines can extract and reference
• a consistent editorial voice that signals genuine expertise rather than generic information

This is not a separate strategy from traditional SEO.

It is the same strategy — write genuinely useful content that fully answers a specific question — applied with the additional awareness that the reader might be an AI engine deciding what to cite, not just a human clicking through a SERP.

The results: what happened in six months

Search visibility

From a standing start in November 2025, Wanderlust Abruzzo accumulated over 20,200 impressions in Google Search Console within 6 months, generating 316 clicks at an average position of 10.1 across all tracked queries.

The growth curve in GSC data shows a consistent upward trend — not a spike from a single lucky ranking, but compounding organic authority building steadily over time.

Keyword rankings

Within the first six months of activity, the site moved 31 keywords up in rankings.

Of these, 24 now sit in the top 3 positions on Google — a result that would be considered strong for a site of any age, let alone one less than six months old.

AI search visibility — the headline result

The most significant outcome is one that most web design and SEO projects do not even measure yet.

Wanderlust Abruzzo ranks #1 on ChatGPT for the query “moving to Abruzzo” — ahead of established relocation consultancies that have been operating for years.

According to Ubersuggest’s AI visibility tracking, the site holds a 42% AI visibility share for that topic.

This means that when someone asks ChatGPT about moving to Abruzzo, Wanderlust Abruzzo is the most frequently cited source — by a significant margin over the next closest competitor.

This is not an accident.

It is a direct consequence of content that answers specific questions completely, clearly, and with the kind of local, first-hand detail that AI engines recognise as authoritative.

Audience and geography

The traffic data confirms the strategy is reaching exactly the right people.

The top countries by active users are:

• the United States (162 sessions),
• Italy (82),
• Germany (27),
• Canada (19),
• the United Kingdom (9)

A near-perfect match for the English- and German-speaking expat audience Viviana built her service around.

Organic Search is the number one acquisition channel, generating 178 sessions in the measured period — ahead of Direct (142) and Organic Social (77).

The content is doing the work it was designed to do.

Real clients from AI search

Two paying clients have been acquired through the website.

One found Wanderlust Abruzzo directly through a ChatGPT conversation — searched conversationally for relocation support in Abruzzo, received a response citing the site, visited, and converted.

This is what AEO-optimised content looks like in practice: not just impressions or rankings, but direct revenue attribution to an AI engine.

The tools that made it happen

Every tool in this project was chosen for a specific reason, not added for its own sake:

• WordPress — the publishing foundation, giving full ownership and flexibility (do not confuse it with WordPress.com)
• Hostinger — fast, reliable hosting at a price that makes sense for a new service business
• Elementor + Royal Elementor Addons — professional page design without custom development overhead
• TranslatePress — clean EN/DE multilingual setup without duplicating the entire site
• SORO — AI-assisted content drafting with a genuine research layer, edited manually for accuracy and voice
• Ubersuggest — keyword research and rank tracking, including AI visibility monitoring
• AnswerThePublic — question-based content ideation directly from real search behaviour

I use all of these tools in my own work and recommend them because they work, not because they are popular.

You can find my full breakdown of each on the resources page — including honest assessments of where each one has limits.

What this means for your business

Wanderlust Abruzzo is not a one-off result.

It is a repeatable outcome — one that follows from combining:

• a solid technical foundation
• intentional content strategy
• an approach to AI search visibility that most web designers and SEO agencies have not yet integrated into their standard practice

If you run a service-based business and you are still:

• relying on social media posts that disappear in 24 hours
• or a website that looks fine but sits quietly while your competitors get found

This is what the alternative looks like.

A website built with strategy compounds over time.

It works while you sleep.

And increasingly, it gets you found by clients who are not even searching on Google.

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Sergio Stanga WordPress Web Designer & SEO Specialist · SR Web Marketing I help independent professionals and SMBs across Italy, Spain, and Europe build WordPress websites that generate long-term organic leads and AI search visibility — without depending on social media. Based in San Giovanni Teatino, Abruzzo, Italy. About Sergio LinkedIn