🐹 Hamsterdam Part 109: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (7/26 to 8/1, 2025)
By Ethan Lazuk
Last updated:
A weekly look-back at SEO & AI news, tips, and other content shared on social media & beyond.
Opening notes, thoughts, and musings:
- Welcome to another new week of Hamsterdam! 🐹
- I appreciate you being here, and look forward to sharing the week’s news! 🙌
If you’re in a rush, hop down to the news portion. 📰
Or continue reading for two vocabulary lessons plus an introduction.
And we’re off …
🧑💻 Marketing word of the week: “Narrative branding”
Narrative branding is an approach to brand building that focuses on storytelling as opposed to slogans, logos, or product features. Narrative branding uses a brand’s origin, mission, values, and customer journey to craft an emotionally resonant story.
The idea behind narrative branding is that people remember stories more than facts; stories build trust, loyalty, and identity over time.
How does it fit with SEO? Well, search engines like Google increasingly prioritize content that demonstrates EEAT, and narrative branding supports this in several ways including improving content depth and engagement, enhancing brand signals, strengthening topical authority, and increasing entity recognition.
For example, a hiking brand might say something like, “We sell backpacks and boots.” But with narrative branding, it may be something like, “We were founded by hikers who couldn’t find appropriate gear for their bodies, so we made our own, building a community of hikers along the way.”
🤖 AI word of the week: “Natural language processing”
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of AI that enables machines to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Simply put, NLP is how machines make sense of what humans say or type, from search queries to chatbot messages.
With NLP, search engines like Google can understand the intent behind a query, determine which words in a sentence carry meaning, and match the intent to semantically relevant content (not just exact-match keywords).
One powerful NLP model is BERT, introduced by Google in 2019. BERT helps Google Search understand the context of words based on all the words around them (bidirectional), better understand longer or more natural-sounding queries (especially ones with prepositions), and return results that reflect the meaning of the query, not just the phrase itself.
😊 Introduction to week 109: “Video overviews”
I was recently playing with NotebookLM’s video overviews. I uploaded several webpages related to SEO audits and generated a video describing them:
I could see this being a nice addition to blog posts or other webpages. Just simply add the webpage as a source, generate a video overview, and embed it into the page.
In the multimodal world of AI that we live in, adding video to webpages can be a great way to increase engagement from users as well as influence visibility in chatbots.
Thank you for supporting Hamsterdam and the cause of SEO & AI learning. 🙏
Enjoy the vibes:
Missed last week? Don’t worry, I got you! Read Part 108 to catch up.
🌟 Other great sources of weekly SEO news:
- The SEO Weekly – Garret Sussman, iPullRank
- SEOFOMO – Aleyda Solis
- Weekly Video Recaps – Barry Schwartz, SER
- Weekly SEO News YouTube channel – Olga Zarr, Seosly
- Niche Surfer – Yoyao Hsueh
Time for our weekly review of SEO social posts, articles, & more …
Now, let’s step inside the white flags of Hamsterdam …
⏩ Jump to a section:
- News, Google updates, & SERP tests
- SEO tips & tidbits
- Fundamentals & resources
- Articles, videos & case studies
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content marketing
- Local SEO
- Data analysis & reporting
- AI, LLMS, & machine learning
- Miscellaneous & general posts
- Older stuff that’s good!
Or keep scrolling to see it all. ⏬
📰 SEO news, Google updates, SERP tests & notable posts
Notable updates or news related to Google Search or related SEO topics.
🍟 SEO tips & tidbits
Actionable tips, cool tidbits, and other snackable findings and observations that can be teaching moments.
Essential information, concepts, or resources to learn about SEO or AI.
Longer-form content pieces shared on social, in newsletters, and elsewhere.
🧑💻 Technical SEO
Everything from basics to advanced moves (and also tools).
✍️ Content marketing
From what is helpful content to user journeys and beyond.
📍 Local SEO
From Google Business Profiles to reviews and more!
📊 Data analysis & reporting
Showing that what you’re doing is helping.
🤖 AI, machine learning, & LLMs
News related to models, papers, and companies.
🤔 General marketing & miscellaneous
This is for great content that isn’t necessarily SEO or marketing-specific. PPC, PR, dev, design, and social friends, check it out!
💎 Older stuff that’s good!
Not everything I find worth sharing is new as of this week, so these are gems I came across published in the past.
Great job making it to the end. You rock! 🪨
Let’s connect!
Hit me up anytime via text or call at 813-557-9745 or on social or email:
Cheers! ✌️
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