about
liam hayward
Hi, I'm Liam Hayward, an SEO specialist and digital marketer with a spark for all things data and code.
A lifelong tinkerer, I was the curious kid who took things apart to see how they worked, and didn't always get them back together again. These days it's websites, algorithms, and AI, but the question hasn't changed: how does it work?
By day, you'll find me with a dozen open tabs, working under the bonnet of a website. By night, I'm building tools, breaking things on purpose, and exploring where search and AI collide next.
Away from the screens, I'm a DIY enthusiast, houseplant hoarder, and book nerd.
countries i've lived and worked in
From school years in Spain to roles across the UK, Singapore, and Australia.
- spain third culture kid
- uk home base
- singapore placement year
- australia working holiday
background + career path
A brief history of me. You can see my detailed career path on my experience page.
the early years
roots
A chunk of my school years were spent in Spain, before I returned to the UK for my GCSEs and college. My first jobs were in hospitality, which led into coordinating conferences and events, where I found I enjoyed organising the moving parts and making things run.
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education
I attended the University of Huddersfield to study Marketing with Public Relations, including a placement year at a marketing agency in Singapore.
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early career
After graduating, I went straight into hands-on digital roles: client-side for the NHS Confederation, promoting their annual healthcare exhibition, and at Premdor as they rebranded to Masonite UK.
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exploring
I travelled to Australia for a working holiday, spending six months agency-side as a Project Manager in-between my adventures. Back in the UK, a period in operational training at Amazon followed during the pandemic, before I chose to return to the agency world and dive deeper into digital.
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the bigger boat
I joined The Bigger Boat as a Digital Marketing Executive focused on SEO, covering technical SEO, analytics, and content strategy. The work centred on improving search performance, strengthening tracking, and turning technical insight into clear actions for clients. That led to a newly-created Digital Account Manager role, bringing technical knowledge to the wider account management team.
- present
now
I stepped away deliberately, taking a planned year out to invest in myself, personally and professionally. This site grew from a way to keep sharp into a professional portfolio and live testing environment for SEO experiments. You can read my thinking on the blog, or explore the free SEO tools I've built along the way. I've also built and launched seohandbook.co.uk, a free, independent SEO reference covering technical SEO, on-page, off-page, keyword research, content strategy, AI search and more.
what's next
This bit's still being written. I'm most drawn to seeing what AI search makes of it all, and the technical problems that don't have tidy answers yet.