Hanif Haroon

Founder & SEO Consultant, The Crawl Space Digital

SEO consultant specializing in technical, semantic and AI search strategy. Writes and reviews every guide published on this site, and leads every client engagement personally.

120+

Articles published

40+

Client engagements

Service specialties

2026

Writing since

About Hanif

Hanif is an independent SEO consultant specializing in technical, semantic and AI search strategy. He works directly with clients on audits, content strategy and enterprise SEO engagements — no account-manager layer, no hand-off to junior staff after the proposal is signed.

He founded The Crawl Space Digital to publish the kind of SEO writing he wished existed earlier in his own career: detailed enough to be genuinely useful to practitioners, grounded in direct client work rather than repeated industry folklore.

Experience

Aug 2026 – Present

Founder, The Crawl Space Digital

Publishing research and running SEO consulting engagements for growth teams and enterprise clients.

Jan 2007 – Present

Independent SEO & AI Search Consultant (Part-Time, Concurrent)

Ran technical and semantic SEO engagements alongside full-time roles below — site audits, GEO/AEO strategy for AI search surfaces, and recovery work after technical or penalty-driven traffic declines.

Aug 2022 – Oct 2025

SEO Consultant (Remote), Confidential Client — Vancouver, BC

Led a remote SEO, content, and development team on research-driven platforms, running technical audits and editorial strategy across dozens of sites.

Apr 2023 – May 2024

Head of Digital Marketing, Meta Frolic Labs

Built a SaaS company's website, blog, and support desk from nothing. Traffic grew 30x in the first year, and the affiliate program — built from zero — brought in partners like RetailMeNot and Newegg.

Jan 2021 – May 2023

Business Unit Head, Digital Marketing, Salsoft Technologies

Led SEO, content, and affiliate strategy for SaaS products, including email marketing and landing-page testing to improve conversion.

Oct 2019 – Jan 2021

Assistant Vice President – SEO, Digitonics Labs

Directed technical and on/off-page SEO across client and internal brands, building long-term growth roadmaps and training an SEO analyst team.

Aug 2017 – Oct 2019

Assistant Vice President – SEO & Growth, Intersys Ltd.

Led a technical recovery on a B2B platform with over a million pages, where roughly 90% weren't indexable. Working with engineering to fix the crawling, rendering, and structured data issues took six months and drove 20x traffic and 10x revenue growth.

Jun 2017 – Aug 2017

Senior SEO Manager, Inter Technologies Ltd.

Audited and removed 3.5 million low-quality backlinks in two months, resolving Google Webmaster Guideline violations and rebuilding the site's structured data.

Jan 2007 – May 2017

Head of Search Engine Optimization, Pakistan Agriculture Research

A ten-year run building SEO strategy from the ground up — keyword research, link building, on/off-page work, and the organization's first structured SEO reporting process.

Areas of expertise

Technical SEO

Crawling, indexing, rendering, Core Web Vitals

Semantic SEO

Entity mapping, topical authority

AI Search / GEO

AI Overviews, answer engine optimization

Enterprise SEO

Governance, crawl budget at scale

Ecommerce SEO

Faceted navigation, product/category pages

Content Strategy

Editorial planning, content decay audits

"Search is changing faster than most teams can track. The interesting part isn't the tactic — it's the signal behind it."— Hanif Haroon