Created by Ethan Lazuk

A new marketing article every week!

About Hamsterdam Marketing

Hamsterdam Marketing is focused on studying the fundamentals of marketing, branding, and relevant social sciences, always applied in an SEO context.

While SEO has its technical aspects, like related to indexing and page experience, they’re still in support of larger business goals, which come from aligning a brand’s content with its target audience’s search journeys.

In short, SEO strategies are marketing strategies.

In the past 10 blue-links era, SEO often focused on tactics, such as keyword optimization of website content or backlink building to achieve higher search rankings of webpages for target keywords.

Marketing fundamentals were always central, but focusing on users first wasn’t necessarily how content ranked best.

In our current era of deep neural networks, LLMs, and generative AI, SEO strategies require marketing and brand building. They’re about positioning a brand’s assets (web, social, UGC, local, video, etc.) across a variety of surfaces (search results, map listings, discovery feeds, knowledge graph features, AI summaries, etc.) for sustained awareness and user engagement.

Every decision in SEO must be based on the best interests of the audience in support of business goals. Every decision must account for marketing fundamentals.

Latest marketing lessons:

Where Hamsterdam Marketing fits in

Within Hamsterdam, we have several projects. This is the third spin-off.

The original Hamsterdam weekly SEO recaps are where we learn about current affairs for search engines and SEO best practices.

We have Hamsterdam History, where we revisit past SEO articles to understand timeless fundamentals or learn how techniques and technology has evolved.

While in Hamsterdam Research, we learn about the latest AI models and research papers to better understand how neural networks and AI work and hypothesize about how search engines might evolve in the future.

Hamsterdam Marketing is where we study marketing fundamentals that tie all of this together.

I like to think of it like this: Hamsterdam History shows us how marketing has always been central to SEO, Hamsterdam weekly SEO recaps show us how search professionals apply marketing today, Hamsterdam Research shows us how search engines might use AI to better reflect user preferences, while Hamsterdam Marketing helps us understand the bases for the human behavior that feeds those search engine data inputs.

The context of marketing within SEO today

“Search engine optimization” has existed since the 1990s, with the first recorded mention in 1997 in Search Engine Watch, according to Danny Sullivan.

For as long as there’ve been search engines, people have tried to improve the visibility of their content in search results. Sometimes this was done in accordance with marketing and branding principles, while other times it was a gamification effort.

In the post-HCU era especially, the reality of SEO has evolved. It requires a people-first approach, where optimizations are made for users first and search engines second, and brands get rewarded for the trust people have in them.

This is largely because modern search ranking systems are driven more by AI, including deep neural networks.

When Google tells us to create people-first content, they don’t mean philosophically. They literally mean that their search systems are detecting patterns from users’ preferences.

Checklists of SEO tactics, even ones based on educated assumptions about what human-engineered ranking systems were looking for don’t apply as much today. It’s not just about great SEO anymore. It’s about user satisfaction, and that means nailing our marketing and branding fundamentals.

Given the current era of AI overviews, AI chat experiences, and robust knowledge graphs and shopping graphs, traditional search listings likely aren’t always the primary driver of organic search engagement.

SEO is about valuable and multimodal content that offers authoritative voices from recognizable brands and their advocates.

It requires an advanced understanding of marketing fundamentals, including everything from branding to social sciences like psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

Those are the topics we’ll tackle here in Hamsterdam Marketing.

Where else can you learn about marketing fundamentals?

Here are some other places to learn about the legacy of search marketing:

• Future of Marketing, Think with Google
• Marketing 101: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners, HubSpot
• Marketing Basics Overview, University of Rhode Island

Thanks for visiting Hamsterdam Marketing. I hope you enjoy the learning adventure!