How Sephora 'hacked' Google search results to surface Black beauty
A new article on Marketing Dive reports that agency R/GA took steps to make the "Black Beauty is Beauty" campaign more visible in search results, hoping to spur longer-term impact on algorithms.
Sephora is supporting its first campaign to promote Black-owned cosmetics brands with an effort to make them easier to find online. The beauty retailer wants people to see more images of Black women and men when they search "Black beauty" on Google or YouTube. As part of its "Black Beauty Is Beauty" initiative that first launched in August, Sephora teamed with Interpublic Group's R/GA on a project to improve the visibility of its content and products for Black consumers. The goal is to make those images easier for search algorithms to crawl and index and to surface them to the top of results. Ellie Bamford is global head of media and connections at R/GA:
The 90-second film, titled "What You Need to Know about #BlackBeauty ft. R/GA," urges viewers to mark relevant content with the #BlackBeauty hashtag. Tagging content helps people find it, especially on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, while visual search is becoming a more important part of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. The tagging strategy aims to influence search algorithms over time so that they recognize Black beauty content, images and links over content related to the horse. On YouTube, R/GA tried to drive discoverability by targeting the same search terms and keywords as on Google, using video watch and search results formats, to push "Black Beauty Is Beauty" content higher in listings.
Sephora is supporting its first campaign to promote Black-owned cosmetics brands with an effort to make them easier to find online. The beauty retailer wants people to see more images of Black women and men when they search "Black beauty" on Google or YouTube. As part of its "Black Beauty Is Beauty" initiative that first launched in August, Sephora teamed with Interpublic Group's R/GA on a project to improve the visibility of its content and products for Black consumers. The goal is to make those images easier for search algorithms to crawl and index and to surface them to the top of results. Ellie Bamford is global head of media and connections at R/GA:
| "The search results and the algorithms are influenced by not only what people are searching for in high volume, but also what's existed in [the] space for the longest time period. There were ways for us to influence that through a really simple but really smart search 'hack,' and that's what we focused on." |
