Members Spotlight: Deviation

25 June 2026

July's member's spotlight turns to Sam Broadhead, Co-Founder of Deviation, a marketing agency working with global ecommerce brands across fashion, travel, health, and beyond. From a conversation at a wedding to winning best SEO agency at the European Search Awards, Sam shares how Deviation is changing the way the world thinks about search.

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Hi Sam! Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about what you do and the company?

I'm Sam, one of the co-founders at Deviation. We're a search marketing agency working with global ecommerce brands across the likes of fashion, travel, health, and multiple other industries.

Take me back to the moment you both decided to start Deviation?

It was a series of conversations over the course of probably a year and it was a conversation that could go on forever. Me and Ash first had the idea when we were both at a wedding and said we should start an agency. We both came from agencies, came from similar marketing backgrounds, so it was almost the next evolution in our journey. The act of starting the company began when we’d been doing around six months of trial testing, failing, winning, doing all these different things, and building what we thought was going to be Deviation. We trademarked something called Search Everywhere, and Ash was working at a big media agency at the time who found the trademark, they found the website, so he got fired pretty much two days later.

I was very much the nervous one, I'm not the risk taker. He's very much "burn the boats." Then two to three months after that, I got made redundant, and it was very much a case of: yeah, let's go for it. Two weeks later, after I was ready to find a new job, he'd run out of his last wage - we won a client a week later. The universe just aligned.

Ashley Liddell and Sam Broadhead, Founders of Deviation

What were the big agencies getting wrong that you saw as an opportunity?

As an industry, it's always been Google, Google, Google. But you speak to anybody outside the industry and ask them about their journey to finding a product: where did you first see it? What questions did you ask? What was the pain point? You realise people weren't just starting with Google and ending with Google. They're taking multiple journeys.

Two years ago, it was very much about TikTok being a search engine. There was our half, which me and Ash were pushing that TikTok is a search engine and you had a lot of traditional SEOs saying no, it's just a social media platform. We realised the industry had stalled. All of these big agencies had spent all of this money and energy just to be a Google agency. We could build quicker, move faster, and bring a fresh perspective where search now is a behaviour. People are now going on to ChatGPT to ask their first question, checking TikTok to see what people are saying, then going back to Google to confirm. People are doing seven different platforms before they even buy something. We just started to piece that all together and that's what we call Search Everywhere.

Can you explain Search Everywhere® to someone who's never heard of it?

When we first kicked it off, people said it was stupid creating content on every single platform ever but that's not the idea. The philosophy is that audiences of whatever industry might be pocketed on different platforms. When we first work with a client, we understand where their audience is spending time, what questions they're asking, what pain points and desires they have connected to the brand and industry. And then we create a strategy for that. If all of your audience are spending their time on Snapchat, we'll create a Snapchat strategy. Search is happening everywhere, that's the whole point.

What does a win look like for one of your clients?

The best way to showcase a win is to explain one of our clients, BullyBillows. They do dog harnesses, dog beds, every accessory around dogs. They came to us and said their search volume on Google was dropping. Where was the interest going? We said the interest isn't going anywhere, if you look at TikTok, the search volumes and conversations around dog harnesses are actually ten times what they are on Google. So the win for us was to work with a brand like BullyBillows to create content that drives people to think "they've just answered my question" and then go back to Google and search directly for the brand rather than a generic term like "dog harness."

Traditional SEO has everyone competing on the same generic search terms. We build something called Preference which is becoming the preferred option. It's like the Coke and Pepsi example. Everyone prefers one or the other. We want to do that with the brands we work with.

What do you love about being part of COLONY, in particular Flint Glass Works?

The community is probably the best bit. We've been to multiple co-working spaces up and down the country, and the one we were in previously in Manchester was a good place to work, but everyone was so distant from each other. Whereas in COLONY it's like one big house. It's really weird to explain, but it's just a community of people all trying to do good work. The staff here are amazing, shout out Kris and Jo.

What does the next 12 months look like for Deviation?

Not slowing down. We've grown from just being me and Ash to a team of 10 to 12 people in the last six to twelve months, gone from zero to seven figures, and we're working with some of the biggest brands in the world like END. Clothing and Upwork. We just want to keep that velocity. We've already taken a second office at COLONY because we've grown that quickly. Maybe in six months, we'll need an even bigger one.

Having recently won some awards, what does it mean to you and the team?

Awards get a bit of a bad rep sometimes, with people saying you paid to enter. But what people don't realise is awards are a celebration of people's work. Yes, you can give someone a shout out in Slack or on LinkedIn, but to put one of our team's strategies against some of the leading agencies in the industry, and to win, and prove that we actually know what we're talking about, that's huge. We love shouting about winning five awards in one night; how we’ve won the best SEO agency in Europe, but for me it's more about the people side of things. It's saying: your strategies are amazing, the work you're doing is amazing, you've beaten the top five agencies in the UK.

We love having Deviation at Flint Glass Works and we can't wait to see how they continue to grow.