Websites running the GFI Theme will be receiving an update in the coming weeks to their search engines via the Relevanssi plugin. Once the integration is complete, search results will now be more accurate and help users find the content they’re looking for. Administrators will now have access to a user search dashboard that gives insights as to what users are searching for across the website.
Trials
When searching for a term like “science”, GFI US’s first result linked to a past event that occurred last year.
With Relevanssi, results are more accurate with the “Science” page showing as the first result.
Across multiple tests on different keywords, Relevanssi returned more accurate results over SearchWP and integrated with FacetWP making it a suitable upgrade to our website search engines.
Features
With the new search engine, a new panel is available on each page that allows for different configurations set when users search a term. The panel can be accessed by clicking a new icon seen in the screenshot below.
With this new panel, we are able to set a page to be pinned to the top of a search results page if the keywords I set are part of the search query.
I’ve set “global policy” as a keyword match, and the result of searching for those keywords pin this particular resource to the top.
This can be useful for situations like “Bruce” where Bruce’s name might appear in several of our pages but we want his team page to appear first.
Weights
Weights can be set based on the type of post. For example, grants can be weighted to appear higher than other post types. If an administrator wants to modify the weights, they can do so by accessing the plugin under Settings -> Relevanssi Premium -> Searching.
By default, all of our custom post types are weighted equally as shown above.
User searches dashboard
User searches can be viewed under Dashboard -> User Searches within the WordPress administration panel. This view allows admins to get a better understanding of what types of content users are searching for. Click tracking allows us to see what result users clicked on for that search term. If a result is low in ranking, we can boost that result if it’s a popular route users are taking.
In the screenshot above, the amount of times the result was clicked is represented as well as where it appeared on the page (avg. rank).