Improve Your WordPress Search with Best Search Plugin - SearchIQ

No doubt, WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world powering about 29% of the world’s website. WordPress is secure, reliable, pleasant, and offers quick and simple installation with design flexibility. Despite world class content publishing capabilities of WordPress, the default built-in search functionality doesn’t come with advanced search algorithm.

Why to improve WordPress internal search? Well, when a visitor lands on your site and can’t find exactly what they are looking for, there’s always a possibility that user will leave the site and search elsewhere. Most people visits a site just to find something specific, and don’t spend time browsing randomly, so you can lose a visitor each time they performs a search on your site. Stats show that implementing site search increases conversion by 1.8% and visitors using site search contributed to 13.8% of the revenue.

To overcome the native WordPress search, we have handful of other search plugins that deliver better results. However, in this article, I’ll be reviewing SearchIQ plugin to show how you can improve WordPress search capabilities with SearchIQ. However, SearchIQ offers JS solution for non-wordpress websites as well, but let’s feature that in another article.

SearchIQ - The Search Solution

SearchIQ is a freemium site search plugin that takes over the default WordPress search to return more optimized results. It makes your content more visible and easy to reach. With SearchIQ, you can offer an instant, intelligent search solution to your website users, manage result ranking, and access real-time analytics to understand your users search intent. Most importantly, it delivers much more accurate results than the default WordPress search.

The plugin not only looks through posts and pages, but also through tags, categories, excerpts, custom fields, product attributes and taxonomies. You can also exclude entire post type (post/page/product) or a specific post by post ID or URL. If you want to exclude any custom field from search, you can do that too.

SearchIQ is absolutely free to get started with. If your business demand advanced features such as PDF, Multi-domain search, Facet, CDN or custom branding; the package starts from just $19/month (if billed annually). All premium packages are kept absolutely simple and affordable to power sites ranging from small blogs to large enterprises. You can check the pricing list here.

How to install SearchIQ on your WordPress site

The setup needs some simple steps to follow. First you need to visit SearchIQ site and sign up to create an account.

Once you activate your account, you need an API key to get started. Login to your account and choose the WordPress plugin install option.

At the end of installation instructions, you can find API key.

Now, you need to install and activate the SearchIQ plugin on your WordPress site as mentioned in the instructions. Next, click on the SearchIQ menu in your WordPress admin and enter your API key.

On submitting API key, SearchIQ will create the search engine. Next, you need to synchronize your posts. This will index your site content and replace the default WordPress search with SearchIQ’s enhanced search solution.

In case your theme doesn’t have a search form, then you need to add a search widget to Sidebar or Bottom menu. If you need to filter search results by post type or category, you can use SearchIQ search box widget.

Need visual instructions! Check out the video to install SearchIQ on your WordPress site in minutes.

SearchIQ features

Quick and Easy Setup - SearchIQ installation is simple and guided process. No coding required and your site will be search ready in minutes.

Fast and Accurate search results - Give your visitors what they are looking for faster. Advanced algorithm delivers fast and accurate search results as you type.

Fully-Customizable UI - Customizing UI to meet your website’s theme and search requirements is quite simple. No hassle of technical integration. Simply enable/disable the desired option and select from dropdown. In case your website is not in English, edit the display text in your language. Search results font and color is also customizable.

Autocomplete:

Results page:

Mobile:

AI to handle typos, fuzzy matches, synonyms - Advanced semantic analysis and error detection enable SearchIQ to effectively direct users to the results they were looking for. Defining synonyms further expand the search queries.

Control over content indexing - SearchIQ allows you to define what to index on your site, giving you complete control over the content you want to exclude from search results. You can exclude post types, categories, custom fields, product attributes and custom taxonomy from indexing.

Custom Result Ranking - SearchIQ prioritize the results relevancy for a compelling search experience. But, you should control your site search to return great results. Custom search lets you tune Matching criteria, Sorting and Field weights. You can select different search matching algorithm (Broad/Exact/All term match) and sorting algorithm to display the most Relevant or Newest post. Further, adjust the weights for fields like Title, Body text, Tags etc. to have even more fine-grained control over the results.

Real-time Analytics - Explore what your users are looking for on your site and how are they interacting with your content. Realtime Analytics offer unique insight to understand your users search intent. It provides top autocomplete and search terms, search clicks, user demographics and technology data, so you can optimize your content to manage your user’s search experience.

Cross domain search (for premium users) - With SearchIQ, you can link multiple domains to unify results. That means your users can see results from all the linked domains for any search term. Create a site group and add the domains to show results.

Enhanced Mobile Support - Your search can be powerful but incomplete without an excellent mobile support. SearchIQ search is mobile ready and works great on all mobile browsers. In addition to optimized search experience, mobile traffic can be filtered in Analytics to find what mobile users are looking for. Similar to Autocomplete, you can customize mobile UI to meet your website’s theme.

Faceted and PDF search (for premium users) - SearchIQ offers facet filtering and PDF search for the premium users. If your site have PDF documents, SearchIQ index these documents and make it available for search. Facet search is another premium feature. For best results, you can define the desired fields that you need as a search filter for your users.

Autocomplete UI:

Results page UI:

Need to know more about features, check their User Guide.