This interview is with Tommi Saltiola, SEO & Fractional CMTO at Tommi Saltiola & Co.

Tommi Saltiola, SEO & Fractional CMTO, Tommi Saltiola & Co

Tommi, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in SEO, digital marketing, and startups?

I got involved in a supplement marketing company in Finland, where there was a relatively small amount of publicly available information in Finnish about the products. I did popular science articles, for example, for CBD-A (Cannabidiolic Acid, from hemp/cannabis), which is still #1 in Google search for CBD-A related searches in Finland. This article resulted in interview requests from magazines and TV shows, some of which I have documented here. 

This gave me a decent understanding of SEO & PR without me having any intention to learn SEO fast. I was just trying to educate people. That’s when I got curious about the potential career in digital marketing & SEO and was part of different startups and client projects related to SEO & digital marketing. I worked as a freelance marketer & web developer for years, and I just accepted a full-time Senior SEO Specialist role at a Fortune 500 company a few weeks ago.

What sparked your specific interest in Search Experience Optimization, or as some call it, Search Everywhere Optimization, and how has that focus shaped your career path?

SEO has, over time, become more and more about optimizing traffic from all online channels and optimizing conversion across conversion points. I have always been interested in multi-channel marketing to maximize reach.

Through my studies, I took statistics classes where I consistently scored 4/5 and later obtained a data engineering certificate from DataCamp, which gave me a much broader view of how search engines and algorithms work across channels. SEO without CRO may drive traffic, but it does not help if it does not convert. Maybe your copy sucks, or the UX is poor; all these points where traffic drops out from the funnel need to be identified and optimized. Be where people dwell, and mostly it’s outside Google Search.

You’ve spoken before about the importance of technical performance for SEO. Can you share an example of a time when you had to get creative to overcome a particularly challenging technical SEO obstacle?

Last autumn, I launched a rebuilt e-commerce site for truehempscience.com. The site had severe technical SEO issues, especially with page load times, and it had previously been hacked with thousands of spam posts across its blog.

I started the project by deleting the posts from the database, hardening the website security, and running a browser automation in Google Search Console to remove thousands of spam pages since they would otherwise need to be done manually. The site was built with Elementor previously, which is slow out of the box, so we swapped that to Bricksbuilder, which only ships the code that you develop into the theme, unlike Elementor, which ships the whole framework just in case, even if the page is empty.

In your experience, how has the rise of AI and machine learning impacted SEO strategies, particularly in the context of Generative Engine Optimization?

AI fuels content generation and strategy workflows, as well as acts as an additional search engine to optimize for. Machine learning/natural language processing can be used for entity extraction for semantic search optimization.

Vector embeddings can map content similarity to eliminate keyword cannibalism. There are countless examples where SEOs need to keep up or they get automated out of their jobs. To optimize for genAI search, it’s not only about backlinks but about brand mentions online. Mostly, you optimize for it as you would for SEO in general.

With the increasing importance of data in marketing, how do you effectively use analytics to not only measure success but also to uncover hidden opportunities or potential pitfalls?

Data should not live in silos, so loading it all into a data warehouse is a start. Also, to continue the effect of AI in SEO and digital marketing, we all have a data scientist in our pocket now. Even if you are not well-versed in data science, you can consult AI to give you the queries and dashboards you need. You can also use it to uncover hidden opportunities or anomalies. The more you have isolated silos, the more you have knowledge gaps to fill.

It is important to have website analytics, GSC, social media, and paid advertising data in one place also because usually users need to see your brand seven times before they purchase. That’s where attribution becomes useful as you get to know estimates of the most efficient advertising/marketing channels before users convert into customers.

You’ve emphasized the importance of tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog for SEO.  Can you walk us through your process of using these tools together to develop a comprehensive SEO strategy?

You can connect Ahrefs to Screaming Frog with API to connect the data directly into the crawl output, so you don’t need to manually join and manage the data between these tools. However, they do serve different purposes and have overlapping features.

I use Screaming Frog specifically for technical and on-page SEO crawling, like structured data, metadata, internal linking, etc., and Ahrefs for keyword research, content strategy, and backlink data. With them together, you get to develop both a technically great website as well as a solid content strategy.

What role does marketing automation play in your overall digital marketing approach, and can you share an example of how you’ve successfully implemented automation to improve efficiency or results?

I tend to automate everything I possibly can, using Python and browser automation with JavaScript. In terms of marketing, one of my recent automations was to set up a cold email campaign for B2B lead generation, where the list is built in Clay.com and automatically imported to ReachInbox.ai, which has an automatic sequence for positive responses to audit prospect websites in terms of their SEO. This fills my and my SEO agency’s sales pipelines with prospects.

For businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve, what emerging trends in the SEO, digital marketing, and startup world are you most excited about and why?

In terms of SEO, I would keep my eyes open for AI on both sides of the game, for search experience as well as SEO optimization. Automation will play a significant role in delivering on SEO initiatives. A lot of new SaaS tools are coming out all the time to further automate different parts of the workflow. I would be careful not to spam, but eager to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks.

What is one piece of advice you would give to aspiring SEO professionals or entrepreneurs just starting out in the digital marketing landscape?

Develop AI agents to automate all of your repetitive tasks across your work, or get automated by someone else.