about
About the creator.
liam hayward
seo specialist · 7+ years' experience
I'm an SEO specialist based in the UK, with a background across in-house and agency digital roles in the UK, Singapore, and Australia. I work across technical SEO and the increasingly blurred line between traditional search and AI-driven discovery.
I created The SEO Handbook to make SEO easier to understand for everyone who was curious enough to search for the answers.
My personal site is liamhayward.co.uk, where I showcase SEO tools, projects, and thought pieces.
what I do
- Technical SEO. Crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals, log file analysis, JavaScript rendering, structured data, international and hreflang setup.
- On-page and content strategy. Search intent mapping, topic clusters, on-page optimisation, content audits, and editorial systems for scale.
- AI search optimisation. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI Overview citation strategy, entity SEO, and llms.txt-era authority signals.
- Measurement and reporting. GA4, Search Console, Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) dashboards, attribution, and the data work that connects SEO to commercial outcomes.
- Tools and side projects. Outside client work: bookmarklets, Chrome extensions, and utilities for day-to-day SEO workflows. I build the things I find myself needing. See them on GitHub.
brands I've worked with
Experience across direct and agency-led projects spanning search and broader marketing.
why i created the seo handbook
The SEO handbook is the guide I needed when I first started in SEO. I had to either wade through contradictory, outdated, and occasionally plain wrong advice on blogs and Reddit, or find thinly veiled advertising masquerading as guides. They covered just enough to make you feel informed, then pointed you to their paid tool for the fix. I wanted to understand SEO properly, not just outsource it.
Even when I found good resources, they'd get added to my ever-growing pile of bookmarks, never to be seen again when I needed them. As this site develops, my aim is to cover everything essential and to point to the better resources where others have covered it well.
This site explains how things work so you can understand and solve problems yourself. I'm keeping it updated as search evolves. I hope it's worth bookmarking.
You might notice that the Technical SEO section is considerably bigger than the others. It reflects my background and speciality, and there's genuinely a lot of moving parts to cover. My favourite parts of the site are the site migration and resources sections.
This site is a one-person project, published for free, with no advertising, no sponsors, and no affiliate relationships. I use AI in the content production, because I am an SEO specialist, not a writer, and the scale of this would not be possible otherwise. The knowledge, the experience, and the fact-checking are mine. More detail on how the process works is on the methodology page.
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.
If you spot one of these callouts on a page, it's one of my key bits of advice: a hard-won lesson, a common mistake I see catch people out, or a shortcut that has saved me hours. Some are my own; others I've picked up from the wider SEO community over the years. They're pulled out from the surrounding theory so they're easy to find and act on.
timeline
What's been built and what's coming next.
April 2026
29 April Launch
Site goes live with eight content pillars: Technical SEO, On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, AI Search, Keyword Research, Content Strategy, Local SEO, and International SEO. Full-text search, Guides section, About, Methodology, and Glossary pages all included at launch.
May 2026
4 May News and updates
News section launched for timely coverage of algorithm updates, Google announcements, and industry developments. RSS feed added.
7 May Search Surfaces pillar
New pillar covering where and how content appears across Google's search features: image search, video search, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and more.
13 May Social Search pillar
New pillar covering SEO for social platforms, starting with Instagram Search.
June 2026
June Content quality pass
Systematic audit across all pillars: fact-checking claims against primary sources, updating for accuracy, labelling deprecated features and fast-moving topics, and adding images to news coverage.
12 June SEO Analytics and Measurement pillar
New pillar covering GA4, Search Console, Looker Studio, attribution, and the data work that connects SEO activity to commercial outcomes.
late June See also: curated related reading
Cluster pages and guides gained a hand-picked "see also" selection, pointing to the one or two pages genuinely worth reading next rather than an undifferentiated list of everything in the pillar.
July 2026
July Navigation and pillar overhaul
Every pillar index and the site navigation reorganised into themed sub-sections, so larger pillars are easier to scan and browse on both desktop and mobile.
6 July Google Preferred Source
The handbook became selectable in Google's Preferred Sources, letting readers prioritise it in their Top Stories and Search results. An "add as a preferred source" button now sits on the news pages and this page.
July Citations and references throughout
A pass across all existing content to add footnote citations where claims are backed by research, data, or official documentation.
July Social Search expansion
The pillar now covers nine platforms and topics, with LinkedIn, X, Pinterest and Quora added this month alongside the existing Reddit, TikTok and YouTube coverage.
July–Aug Twenty-three new cluster pages
Substantial additions across SEO Analytics (reporting and dashboards, SEO A/B testing, share of voice, Microsoft Clarity), Technical SEO (crawl errors, deindexing, index bloat, orphan pages, IndexNow), Off-page SEO (guest posting, broken link reclamation), and SEO Basics (negative SEO, parasite SEO, SEO myths, search personalisation).
August 2026
August From-scratch review
Every pillar rebuilt from the ground up: each topic researched cold, then the live page compared against the version a current practitioner would write today. Caught advice that had dated, gaps the original draft missed, and claims stated more confidently than the evidence supported.
22 August Ecommerce SEO pillar
The thirteenth pillar: product and category pages, faceted navigation, site architecture, store speed, product structured data, AI shopping agents and agentic commerce. Seven clusters, each reviewed from scratch against current sources before publication rather than after it.
Upcoming
upcoming Collaborative SEO pillar
The fourteenth pillar: working with developers, paid search, PR, social, and account teams, and making the case for SEO to the people who approve it.
upcoming Images and screenshots
Annotated screenshots, diagrams, and UI examples added throughout, so articles are easier to follow for those new to the tooling.
upcoming Downloadable assets
Checklists, audit templates, and report frameworks available as PDFs: site migrations, technical audits, content audits, and more.
upcoming External resources
Curated links to tutorials, courses, and tools: the best external resources for each topic, alongside the handbook content rather than instead of it.
get in touch
Working on something where SEO matters? Reach me via liamhayward.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn.
A note on outreach: I don't do guest posts, link exchanges, or paid mentions, and I don't reply to emails or connection requests about them. This site has no sponsors and no affiliate links. Anything else, I'm glad to hear from you.
