Artificial neural network (ANN), a powerful technique, has been used widely over the last decades in many scientific fields including engineering problems. However, the backpropagation algorithm in ANN is based on a gradient descent approach. Therefore, ANN shows high potential in local stagnancy. Besides, choosing the right architecture of ANN for a specific issue is not an easy task to deal with. This paper introduces a simple, effective hybrid approach between an optimization algorithm and a traditional ANN for damage detection. The global search-ability of a heuristic optimization algorithm, namely grey wolf optimizer (GWO), can solve the drawbacks of ANN and also improve the performance of ANN. Firstly, the grey wolf optimizer is used to update the finite element (FE) model of a laboratory steel beam based on the vibration measurement. The updated FE model of the tested beam then is used to generate data for network training. For an effective training process, GWO is utilized to identify the optimal parameters for ANN, such as the number of the hidden nodes, the proportion of dataset for training, validation, test, and the training function. The optimization process provides an optimal structure of ANN that can be used to predict the damages in the beam. The obtained results confirm the accuracy, effectiveness, and reliability of the proposed approach in (1) alleviating the differences between measurement and simulation and (2) damage identification including damage location and severity, in the tested beam considering noise effects. For both applications, dynamic characteristics like natural frequencies and mode shapes of the beam derived from the updated FE model, are collected to calculate the objective function