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 guide 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
Experience across direct and agency-led projects spanning search and broader marketing.
why this site exists
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 I had to either wade through contradictory, outdated, and occasionally plain wrong advice on blogs and Reddit, or find thinly veiled advertising masquerading as guides.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.
timeline
What's been built and what's coming next.
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.
News section launched for timely coverage of algorithm updates, Google announcements, and industry developments. RSS feed added.
New pillar covering where and how content appears across Google's search features: image search, video search, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and more.
New pillar covering SEO for social platforms, starting with Instagram Search.
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.
A dedicated section covering product page optimisation, faceted navigation, crawl budget for large catalogues, structured data for products, and international ecommerce SEO.
New pillar covering GA4, Search Console, Looker Studio, attribution, and the data work that connects SEO activity to commercial outcomes.
A pass across all existing content to add footnote citations where claims are backed by research, data, or official documentation.
Annotated screenshots, diagrams, and UI examples added throughout, so articles are easier to follow for those new to the tooling.
Checklists, audit templates, and report frameworks available as PDFs: site migrations, technical audits, content audits, and more.
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.