🐹 Hamsterdam Part 112: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (8/16 to 8/22, 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: “Qualifying a lead”
To qualify a lead means to figure out whether someone who has shown interest in your product or service is worth pursuing further.
Some leads are ready to buy, others are just curios or may never buy. Qualification is about saving time and resources by focusing on the leads with real potential.
There are marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs). MQLs are leads who interact with marketing materials (like downloading a guide or opening an email). They’ve shown interest but may not be ready to buy.
SQLs are leads the sales team has vetted as having the budget and need for a product or service, i.e., they’re worth investing time in a call or pitch.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Query expansion”
Query expansion is the process of modifying or enhancing a user’s original query to improve retrieval results. Since people don’t always use the exact words that match what they’re looking for, the system expands their query to cover related terms.
For example, a user searching for “car insurance” may get expanded queries like “automobile insurance,” “vehicle coverage,” or “auto policy.”
There are different types of query expansion, including:
- Synonym expansion (“laptop” to “notebook computer”)
- Stemming and lemmatization (“run” to “running” and “ran”)
- Contextual/conceptual expansion (“heart attack” to “myocardial infarction”)
- Relevance feedback (system extracts important terms from the first query’s results and re-queries those)
- User-driven expansion (auto-complete queries).
Query expansion means the end of keyword stuffing. If content is semantically rich and covers related concepts, search engines will surface it for variations of queries.
😊 Introduction to week 112: “Uncontrollables”
Sometimes in SEO there are uncontrollable factors that influence traffic to a site. I’m not talking about AIOs or Google ranking fluctuations, but rather external factors.
I’m working on one site now where traffic is down in the last 6 months over the previous period. Now, they do suffer from the great decoupling a bit, but this brand was also featured on a TV program.
When that program ran, traffic (and sales) would spike. Unfortunately, more reruns occurred in the earlier part of the year than the latter, which skewed the traffic and revenue numbers.
We can’t always control for factors like these, but we can at least identify and explain them.
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 111 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.
>> Check back next week!
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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