Breaking Down Silos: The Search Everywhere® Trifecta Checklist

In 2025, the biggest challenge for digital teams isn’t just visibility — it’s breaking out of silos. SEO, brand, and social media teams often run their own agendas, report on different metrics, and miss the compounding power they could unlock if they worked as one.
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At Deviation, we call the solution the Search Everywhere® Trifecta. It’s about treating Search, Brand, and Social not as separate disciplines, but as a discoverability engine. When these teams align, brands move from being “seen” to being preferred.
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To help you get started, we’ve taken our recent work with ThruDark, where we wanted to help capitalise on their culture of collaboration and built a 9-step checklist you can deploy right away inside your organisation - leveraging what works.

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1. Audit Current Discovery Signals

Start by mapping how your brand is being discovered. Look at search engines, social platforms, and online communities.

Where are people first hearing about you?
Where are they searching before they buy?

2. Identify Siloed Metrics

List the metrics each team is chasing in isolation.

SEO rankings, PR coverage, influencer engagement — all valuable, but without connection.

The overlaps are where opportunity hides.

3. Align on Shared KPIs

Agree on joint measures of success. Instead of only tracking keyword positions or press mentions, focus on outcomes that cut across silos:

branded search growth, preference signals, discovery mentions, and cultural relevance.

All examples of shared KPI opportunities.

4. Build Cross-Channel Dashboards

Nothing drives collaboration like a single source of truth.

Create a dashboard that integrates SEO, Brand, and social metrics so everyone sees how their actions amplify each other.

5. Run Search-Informed Experiments

Take one campaign and let SEO insights fuel brand and social work.

For example, use trending queries to brief creators on TikTok/YT/Instagram or provide PR opportunities to develop AI/LLM Visibility.

Measure the impact on both social engagement and search demand.

6. Share Cultural Insights Widely

Search teams often sit on gold (without realising the value of what we can explore).

Reddit threads, TikTok trends, and even AI citation sources reveal where conversations are moving.

Package these up into insight packs for brand and social colleagues... it’s how you earn a seat at the overall strategy table, as opposed being told what you're working towards later.

7. Celebrate Compound Wins

Don’t just report on your own progress. Document and circulate case studies where collaboration worked. THINK, a TikTok trend that led to a spike in Google searches, or PR coverage that boosted branded search / citations and mentions via AI/LLM.

8. Formalise Collaboration Rituals

Make it structural. Set up a monthly “Digital Team Syncs” where Search, Brand, and Social review each other’s priorities, campaigns, and results. Over time, it becomes muscle memory and all of the above will occur more naturally.

9. Make “Preference” the North Star

Visibility is no longer enough.

The shared goal should be to become the 'preferred' option. Whether it’s SEO content, a PR story, or a TikTok post, every tactic should point toward making your brand the default choice in the customer’s mind.

Why This Matters

Search isn’t just a platform anymore... it’s a behaviour.

Consumers are discovering brands across TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and of course, Google. If your teams aren’t connected, you’ll miss where demand is shifting.

The Search Everywhere® Trifecta isn’t a slogan; it’s a framework for making digital teams work as a discoverability engine. Use this checklist to start breaking down silos, aligning signals, and ultimately building brand preference.

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