🐹 Hamsterdam Part 81: Weekly SEO & AI News Recap (1/13 to 1/19, 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! 🙌
- I wrote two blog posts this week (with the help of AI): one about RAG and another about AIOs, query rewriting, and reranking models. Check ’em out!
- Enjoy the remaining NFL playoff games today! 🏈
- So long TikTok, fun while it lasted! 👋
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: “Persona”
A persona in marketing represents a fictional but realistic representation of your ideal customer.
Factors that go into building personas might include:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, education.
- Psychographics: Values, interests, lifestyle, attitudes.
- Behaviors: Online habits, purchasing patterns, motivations, goals.
- Needs and Pain Points: Challenges they face that your product or service can solve.
Using personas will help you better understand your target customer to deliver more personalized content in a more targeted marketing strategy.
How can you create a persona, you might ask?
You can gather research from customer interviews, surveys, or even using your GA4 data and then look for patterns from which you can create a profile.
A lot of personas wind up kind of cheesy, like “Tech-savvy Tina.” I prefer to leave out the funny names and instead focus on characteristics.
Your content should map to the buyer’s journey, so it’s helpful to develop multiple personas and then determine which apply to a particular search intent for your content.
🤖 AI word of the week: “Parameter”
A parameter in machine learning is a variable that is internal to the model. It’s value is learned from the data during the training process. Parameters define how the model transforms input data into the desired output and are essential for the model to make predictions on new data.
In a neural network, the parameters are the weights and biases of the connections between neurons. During training, these values are adjusted to enable the network to learn complex patterns in the data.
There’s a key difference between parameters and hyperparameters, which are set before training to the control the learning process, rather than learned from data during training and internal to the model.
🕸️ Introduction to week 81: Neural IR
“Different from previous non-neural ranking models that rely on elaborately-designed features and manually designed functions, neural ranking models can automatically learn
low-level dense representations from data as ranking features.” (Source)
If you’re not familiar with neural information retrieval (NeuIR), you’re not alone. I wasn’t either.
However, in looking for modern information retrieval papers and textbooks, “neural IR” is the keyword — so to speak — that has given me the most fruitful information.
I’m currently reading a paper on it by Microsoft. It’s so far very informational and I plan to share more about it soon in my blog.
If you’re interested in learning about not only traditional IR basics but digging into how deep learning has changed the discipline in recent years, check out the two papers linked in this introduction.
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 80 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 or 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! 🪨
🤝 Want help with your SEO strategy?
I’m an independent SEO consultant focusing on custom audits and holistic strategies for brands. Don’t hesitate to reach out, or visit my about page for more information.
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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