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ThruDark
The Challenge
ThruDark is a premium British technical outerwear brand. At its price point, nobody buys on impulse. Customers choose ThruDark deliberately, so the job was never just to drive traffic. It was to build preference.
At the same time, the category was opening up. Hiking and outdoor activity were growing, and GORPCORE had taken technical outerwear onto city streets. That created a big discovery opportunity, as long as ThruDark could own the conversation early, wherever it started.
ThruDark came to us wanting to stop treating search as a single channel. The challenge was to:
- Grow brand demand, not just rankings
- Put intent at the heart of search marketing
- Reach two audiences with one need: serious hikers who need kit that performs, and style-led urban buyers drawn in by GORPCORE
- Connect discovery, consideration and conversion across the whole search universe
What we did
Insight: the outdoor kit conversation starts on social.
Our Search Universe Analysis, built with SparkToro and Buzzabout.ai, mapped conversations across Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. It showed that outdoor buyers ask practical questions on social first. We grouped those questions into intent pillars such as “Layering for hikes”, “Hiking packing and prep” and “Choosing a base layer”, then used Exploding Topics to link them to emerging trends like rucking.
One strategy, not two silos.
Competitors ran SEO and organic social separately. We mapped Google keyword research against social search demand to create a single social-search roadmap. Every pillar got a TikTok answer, a creator answer and a Google page.
Creator content, briefed like search.
Every creator brief targeted a real query from the roadmap. Titles, captions, voiceovers and on-screen hooks were written to rank in TikTok, Instagram and YouTube search.
- 155 social-search-led videos posted
- 121 active creator and owned accounts
- 54 structured content briefs
Owning one conversation everywhere: summer hiking.
“What to wear hiking in hot weather” shows the model in action. ThruDark creator content holds four of the top eight TikTok results for “summer hiking clothes”. On Google, ThruDark’s guide Summer Hiking Outfits: What To Wear to Beat the Heat ranks above major high-street retailers, and our Trophy Keywords climbed into the top 10:
- “hiking clothes for hot weather”: position 6 (up 5)
- “hot weather hiking clothes”: position 7 (up 6)
- “hot weather hiking clothing”: position 8 (up 7)
Technical SEO: cutting to grow.
We made a deliberate trade-off: less visibility for irrelevant informational queries in exchange for more high-intent traffic. We removed pages that attracted the wrong searches or competed with commercial pages. This refocused crawl and ranking strength on the pages that convert.
We also kept ThruDark’s most commercial pages visible to search engines. When a third-party site tool began rendering product listing content in JavaScript, we caught it within a week through our monthly technical audit. We worked with the provider on a fix, and when none could protect organic performance, we made the evidence-led case for removing the tool. Organic keywords are now recovering, most recently up 10% month on month.
The outcome
Year to date (Jan–Sept 2026 vs the same period in 2025):
- +55% organic revenue year on year, with no paid media
- +17% brand search, to 40.5K searches a month
- ~1,000% average growth in brand + product searches (e.g. “ThruDark jacket”)
- +321% Google clicks (523K)
- CTR up from 1.13% to 3.70%
- Average position improved from 28.8 to 10.5
- +29% Google impressions (14.1M)
- +42% sessions (2.37M)
On social search:
- 4.9M views from 155 videos
- 169.1K likes, 8.4K shares and 17.6K bookmarks
- 4% engagement rate
The shares and saves matter most. They show buyers researching, not just scrolling.
This work proves three things:
- For modern outdoor audiences, search doesn’t start on Google
- Creator-led discovery can directly drive brand demand
- When intent sits at the centre, Search Everywhere® compounds
ThruDark doesn’t just rank. It’s the answer on TikTok, on Google and everywhere in between.
Award submissions
Most agencies would search everywhere for results like these...
Commercial impact, driven by how people actually discover brands.
Increase in Organic Revenue (YoY)
Increase in [Brand] Searches
Increase in [Brand] + [Key Term] Searches
Views Across Creator-Led Social Search Content
“We’ve been working with Deviation since last year and the results have been outstanding. Their Search Everywhere® approach has genuinely cut through the noise, getting us in front of the right audience across Google, AI search, and social platforms. Audience-first thinking. Sharp Digital PR. Clear, measurable growth in traffic, engagement, and of course revenue. It’s been a proper partnership – straightforward, collaborative, effective, and delivering exactly what we needed.”
Chris Reynolds, CEO
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