January 28th, 2020

While you were busy tracking your firm’s and your clients’ mentions out of context – instead of how they actually appear in search results, Google became the fourth company to cross the $1 trillion market cap threshold.

That astounding valuation is the latest proof that Google is nothing less than the front door to every business, organization and individual on earth. Crafting pitch-perfect messages for your website will always be important. But with two-thirds of web traffic generated by search, even your own site is just one result on that crucial first page – competing not only with news articles and Twitter results, but also knowledge panels, answer boxes and other actionable information.

Be honest: do you even type a company’s full URL into the search bar anymore? Or just the name (maybe with an assist from autocomplete) and then hit enter, capping things off with a click on the first search results?

Lightbox Search, a first-of-its-kind, new technology platform, empowers communications professionals to take greater control of Page One search results – by identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats among what business partners, clients, media and investors actually see when they use Google to find you. With a few keystrokes, Lightbox allows users to search the first 100 results. Opportunities for improvement – or threats – may lurk on Page Two or Three.

B2B companies – from PR and marketing agencies to private equity firms to health systems and hospitals – save both time and money using Lightbox. Our platform is the only tool to aggregate and analyze the most critical factors that determine the placement of search results in the actual context of how they appear. Lightbox then displays those results with insights, so you understand why results appear higher or lower in search rankings. Think of it as an MRI or X-ray of search results that will also benefit reputation management, crisis communications, brand managers and corporate communications professionals.

What you will not experience is a firehose of information that is overwhelming, time consuming to understand and often irrelevant to your needs. Lightbox was built by corporate communications and PR experts for corporate communications and PR experts. Our concept, design and programming teams transformed sophisticated data sources into a service built for you.

The Lightbox Score, a proprietary data point measuring the digital health of your search, shows you how the world perceives your organization, brand, firm or executive when confronted with that first page of search results. The score is derived by factors determining the sentiment, strength and optimization of results. It ranges from negative 100 (awful, in other words) to positive 100 (great and almost unattainable).

To augment its analysis and score calculation, Lightbox pulls in nearly a dozen data sources from complex SEO tools to Google itself. By carefully aggregating data from such an array of advanced sources in the context of real search results, Lightbox saves users the time, effort and frustration of managing multiple disparate tools and platforms. For many users, it also saves money – all while offering information in an understandable format they otherwise would never see.

Lightbox is not a traditional SEO tool – but its analysis will give you a roadmap for taking better control of owned and managed content to ensure it ranks higher. Nor is Lightbox a media monitoring service – but it will help you understand why that five-year-old slanderous story outranks your own website. Lightbox illuminates search as the next way to experience a brand – something that should matter as much to the public relations professional as it does to the digital reputation manager.

By revealing the factors determining the ranking of search results, communicators of every stripe are empowered like never before to change those results. Lightbox reveals opportunities for content development, public relations efforts and SEO that could move “on deck” search results from page two to page one. Organizations can mitigate the impact of controversial results, such as activist campaigns or news of executive departures, by ensuring they are seen within the context of prominent, up-to-date and accurate search listings.

There’s even a way to see how potential changes to search results would affect a brand’s Lightbox score. A unique drag-and-drop feature lets users “see several moves ahead” so they can best develop a long-term strategy. Private equity firms seeking to manage their investments would benefit immeasurably. As would health systems feeling the impact to their reputations due to affiliated hospitals, physicians and executives with troubled results.

Reports generated by Lightbox are vivid, comprehensive and easy to read. Users can upload logos and images to brand or white-label them. The Lightbox Score can also be white-labeled upon request. The platform even synthesizes and displays historical results from prior saved reports on digestible, interactive timelines. This information is critical to assessing improvements or negative changes from month to month, week to week, or even day to day.

Don’t you need to know the reasons why those particular results appear on the first page of your Google search? How can you confidently take any action to impact the rankings until you know that? That’s like playing darts blindfolded: dangerous. The companies, brands and clients you represent count on you to impact how audiences experience them online. Their reputations are defined by what search engines display. More than any other solution, Lightbox will help you create that critical first impression — and continue to shape perceptions in the future.

And it is indeed a first-of-its-kind. We searched high and low across literally hundreds of search engine platforms, news and social media monitoring companies, and online or digital reputation firms – and saw a clear need for Lightbox. That’s why we have spent hundreds of hours of programming time over years building this unique and powerful platform. We’re proud of what we have built and continue to refine. Give it a whirl with a live demo using your own company or client search terms.