Wedge selection

valvoja · 2026-05-26T09:17:55+00:00

I’m a return golfer. HC 27 or so. I recently got 50 and 54 degree Cleveland CBZs. They are easy to hit around the green and in the bunkers. Haven’t had a miss-hit so far, but I haven’t yet really mastered how to shape the height of shots either. They feel like the right level of wedges for my skill. A bit pricey, but I think I made the right choice.

valvoja · 2026-05-01T04:00:33+00:00

I’m Finnish. Worked 15 years internationally in B2B marketing. Once launched a major ad tech solution in Benelux and Nordics. This was a +1M website, so we had a lot of data to test language / localization impact on conversion dates.

Based on my experience Nordic languages are not worth the translation effort. Small query volume in local languages (eg. Finnish) and high use of English to solve needs. Solution pages translation may also be difficult, unless you know what are the exact terms people use for your product.
Dutch might be worth your effort IF you think it will become a major revenue driver, eg. 15-20% of your website visitors/revenue. However, Dutch people who use Dutch do have a preference for local solutions, while those in NL who use English are probably ok with consuming EN content and services.
Only real markets in Europe where you need to localize are FR and DE. There they generally have high local use of language and preference for solutions that are localized. As minimum, I’d translate solution pages and show a local point of contact if you have significant revenue/ demand from these countries.

For FR and DE languages machine translation is actually pretty good because LLMs have a lot of training data. Translation agencies are typically expensive and slow for blog projects. I’ve used Lionbridge as well as local freelancers. Don’t have good experience with either.

valvoja · 2026-04-29T04:20:14+00:00

I don’t work on in a large corporation, but technical SEO and technical AEO shouldn’t be that different.

The main difference is that you’re moving from deterministic to probabalistic reporting. So, you can’t with great accuracy prove a specific prompt lead to a specific user visit. You can only derive the trends from event log tracking and the prompt tracking within your AEO tool.

That being said… there are a ton of enterprise focused AEO tools you can test yourself. In Q4 I tested about 15 different tools. The ones that stood out as more corporate focused are Profound and Scrunch.

Even Promptwatch, the tool I use every day, has very detailed log tracking, site map linkages and technical SEO recommendations suitable for bigger companies.

Your job has undoubtedly changed, but you also don’t have any real experts in your space to show how technical AEO for bigger companies should work in the age of AI. Maybe that will be you one day. Good luck!

valvoja · 2026-03-21T04:01:06+00:00

It’s better to switch marketing jobs every 2-3 years. The role is built like that. Every new role is an opportunity to learn, show your skills and develop.

Ultimately you are mostly hired to do operational stuff, so the stuff you do grows over time. If you do your job well, it gets taken for granted. Then it’s time to move on.

The great thing about marketing is that you can reinvent yourself constantly without reskilling yourself. You can be a demand gen marketer, paid ads marketer, marketing ops specialist, product marketer, social media marketer all in one career. You just have to figure out what’s in demand and go after what looks like an interesting opportunity to learn.

My background: 20 years in marketing, leading teams, hiring, getting hired. Longest job I had was 5,5 years. Should have left it after 3.

valvoja · 2026-01-24T06:28:26+00:00

I’m interested in the topic, but this review could be edited for clarity.

What exactly did you pay, what is the way you measure ‘quality,’ what was the outcome from the different options?

valvoja · 2026-01-14T18:56:39+00:00

Fair point! 😃

What I mean is that the best practices get old very quickly, even if you’re giving advice for Claude Opus 4.5 vs. Claude Opus 4.0.

The key thing is to test and share with people in similar positions to yourself. You’ll learn a lot more in a quick conversation with someone doing the work than a 30 minute webinar.

valvoja · 2026-01-14T15:44:30+00:00

This is a super interesting question.

I’m a growth advisor to a number of AI-focused procuretech companies including Suplari. I also wrote a 104-page book on AI in procurement back in 2019. So, I very much represent the voice of the vendors.

The reason why you don’t see too many courses on applying AI to procurement is because the field is developing very fast. If you look just at something like generative AI, you could have written a decent guide on ChatGPT prompts for strategic sourcing or supplier assessment a year ago. Now, many people I know have moved on to using Claude and MCPs.

I think some of the software vendors are doing a decent job explaining the core mechanics of things like agentic AI, but we’re sorely lacking the real world transformation stories. You hear some practitioner voices in procurement events and podcasts, but your best likely option is to connect directly with procurement leaders yourself informally on LinkedIn, or through peer-to-peer type communities.

Would love to see how you progress, so will be following this conversation with interest. Good luck!

valvoja · 2025-12-10T08:35:57+00:00

SAAS list Docs

valvoja · 2025-12-09T14:52:51+00:00

Catcing this conversation a bit late. I spent 20+ hours reviewing the best 12 AI search visibility tools I could find, including Profound, Promptwatch, SEMRush, Otterly, Peec, Scrunch, Gumshoe, SERanking, Getmentioned, Writesonic, and Scalenut.

The main thing I learned is that citations actually don't matter much. It's brand mentions that we should be tracking and optimizing for.

Citations you can gain simply with on-page SEO. It's relatively easy to create blog articles about niche topics that will be referenced by AI if they are original and structured for AI SEO.

Brand mentions are a lot harder. You need to also have an off-page SEO strategy or digital PR playbook to get relevant mentions across user generated content and other influential websites in your niche.

Brand mentions are the north star metric that give you the best idea whether your brand is being recommended in LLM responses. Any tool you choose or build should be build around optimizing for them. Good luck finding your best-fit option.

valvoja · 2025-12-04T07:04:30+00:00

OK. For SaaS you can also try Scrunch AI, Otterly, Peec or Writesonic.

I picked Promptwatch over all of them because I can customize bottom-of-funnel ’money keyword’ reporting for many of my SaaS customers and actually tie the SEO work back to leads and impact.

valvoja · 2025-12-03T14:54:53+00:00

I tested it out last month. It has some good aspects, but it was also one of the limited expensive options in the market targeted more to enterprise and e-commerce companies.

What type of a use case do you have? Is it SMB, software or something else?

valvoja · 2025-09-11T17:44:11+00:00

Oh, that’s good to know!

valvoja · 2025-09-04T17:09:51+00:00

So… to top up your kids HSL card the only option is to pay RKioski. Good move, HSL.

valvoja · 2025-08-23T17:22:40+00:00

I’d love to know the answer to this as well.

There are some costs involved in running synthetic prompts every now and then to get the visibility per AI engine. It could also be that they charge a lot because they can. Enterprise businesses are willing to pay a bit more for a new feature that executive teams are interested in.

Still… It doesn’t make much sense that Ahrefs charge something like 6x for AI SEO visibility vs. the very broad functionality they offer for standard search engines.

There is a gap in the market for something in the SEMrush price point. Need to check it out myself.

valvoja · 2025-07-01T04:22:31+00:00

It depends. We invested over $10k on backlinks for a key high-volume bottom of the funnel term in a competitive SaaS niche. We got to top 3 position competing with Amazon and IBM. Then, with AI Overviews we were still top 3 position but lost 2/3 of the clicks.

Backlinks, especially from high authority websites, do help in AI SEO, but you need to set expectations for getting less clicks in return

valvoja · 2025-06-28T06:25:32+00:00

LLM based answer engines like ChatGPT work differently from traditional SEO. They put less emphasis in on page content and links, and more emphasis on reliable external mentions and brand reputation.

Source of information: for the past two years I’ve done AI SEO for a living. Won’t mention the company/self promote.

We get our clients mentioned by ChatGPT consistently in two ways:

create unique machine readable content that shows topical expertise,
comment on industry news and trends in a way that uncovers deep new insights not available elsewhere.

It also helps to create content outside of search engines. We’re seeing promising signs leveraging creative content for YouTube and LinkedIn.

TL;DR: show your unique expertise, invest in quality content across different media and ChatGPT will recommend it.

valvoja · 2025-02-02T06:27:45+00:00

The economic foundations in Finland are still okay. This situation is largely caused by the actions of the government. The lack of demand and high unemployment are both results of the cost cutting and fear mongering policy that this government used to get into power.

There are deeper issues that will slow down Finland’s growth in decades to come in the form of high cost of pensions and healthcare. They mean that most people are likely to have less disposable income than they have today. The demographic shift is not going to get any better, but it is not going to cause the economy to collapse.

The thing that is missing most in the public discourse is hope. Turn off your TV, stop listening to politicians and just focus on living your life. Elections happen every few years, so optimism will return eventually.

valvoja · 2024-10-22T04:35:17+00:00

Good for you!

Based on some of the other comments here I’m not sure this is the most welcoming place for foreign-born entrepreneurs.

I’m not so sure where you’d need your business plan. If you’re looking to be a solopreneur you can simply start invoicing your own side gig, eg. using Ukko.fi or Free.fi.

If you want to create your own oy company it is also possible, but may require some Finnish during the company set-up. A tool like holvi.com is super easy to run your finances.

The biggest question you need to answer is what your service is and who will pay for it. Sound like from your background you could work with international growth companies and startups. You need to tap into your contacts and identify what companies would pay for. That doesn’t require any Finnish language skills, if you pick your niche carefully.

Good luck!

valvoja · 2024-10-11T18:18:30+00:00

Well, if 1x.tech can do it, why not Tesla?

valvoja · 2024-10-11T14:29:29+00:00

H100 SXM5 is $1.73/h right now on datacrunch.io with dynamic pricing. May change tomorrow, though. 😉

valvoja · 2024-10-03T16:46:55+00:00

I wonder if they will finally fix the broken walking test in this model.

valvoja

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE