about
The person behind the handbook.
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.
My personal site is liamhayward.co.uk, where I showcase my work history, projects, and thought pieces. This site, seohandbook.co.uk, is the handbook I wish had existed when I first started in SEO.
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, 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
why this site exists
I wanted the resource I would have loved when I started in SEO. Most of what I found was thinly veiled advertising: guides that covered just enough to make you feel informed, then handed off to a paid tool to do the actual work. I wanted to learn how to find + fix problems myself, not have software produce a list of issues and leave me none the wiser.
This site is the alternative: independent and factual. Every piece covers how something works and how to act on it.
It is a one-person project, published for free, with no advertising, no sponsors, and no affiliate relationships. I use AI to write the prose, because I am an SEO specialist, not a writer, and the scale of this would not be possible otherwise. The knowledge, the structure, and the fact-checking are mine. More detail on how the process works is on the methodology page.
get in touch
Working on something where SEO matters? Reach me via liamhayward.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn.