Do you want to prioritize specific search results in WordPress?
Just like a grocery store puts new or featured products on display at the entrance to attract customers, you may want to prioritize content such as a new product page to ensure it gets the most visibility even in search results.
However, the default WordPress search engine doesn’t support search results ordering. Therefore, we’ll show you how to prioritize specific search results in WordPress in just a few clicks.
Key Takeaways:
- The default WordPress search doesn’t let you customize search result order.
- Being able to prioritize specific search results can help grow your business.
- Anyone can do it without writing a single line of code using SearchWP.
Why Prioritize Specific Posts Or Pages In Search?
By default, WordPress doesn’t allow you to control the order of search results. However, it can be really helpful in certain situations.
For instance, if you operate an online store, you can increase sales by making your best-selling product appear first in the search results.
Or, if you’re launching a new product, positioning it at the top of the search results is an excellent strategy to maximize exposure and collect customer feedback.
Similarly, for bloggers with extensive content, adjusting search priorities can enhance the visibility of lesser-viewed articles, driving additional traffic.
Conversely, you might choose to feature your most popular articles prominently to align with the search preferences of your audience.
It guarantees a better user experience for your audience and allows you to reduce the bounce rate, which is one of the most contributing factors for search engine ranking.
Besides, satisfied visitors are more likely to return to your site once again, which means even more traffic for your business.
So, let’s see how you can prioritize specific search results in WordPress.
How To Prioritize Specific Search Results In WordPress
The best and easiest way to prioritize specific search results in WordPress is to use SearchWP. It not only lets you prioritize search results but also allows you to add and remove content sources, collect on-site search activities, and exclude content when necessary.
Join the team of over 60,000 website owners who use SearchWP because of its rich features. Here’s what you can do with SearchWP:
- Display Live Search Results: Instantly shows search outcomes as users type, enhancing user interaction by providing immediate feedback.
- Track Search Behaviors: Monitors search activity on your site, offering insights into customer preferences and behaviors.
- Expand Keyword Flexibility: Utilizes keyword stemming to enhance search results by including related terms, thus broadening the search scope.
- Integrate with WooCommerce: Seamlessly connects with WooCommerce, enhancing the search functionality for product media files and more.
- Index PDFs and Office Documents: Enables searchability of content within PDFs, Office documents, and both plain and rich text files, improving access to document information
Now, please follow the step-by-step guide on how to prioritize specific search results in WordPress.
Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP
First you need to select a SearchWP package that suits your needs as each offers distinct features.
Download the plugin by accessing the “Downloads” section on your Account page.
Copy your license key from the same page; this is essential for the activation process.
Install and activate SearchWP just like any other standard WordPress plugin. Once activated, click “Start Onboarding Wizard‘ for a step-by-step guided setup once the plugin is active.
Alternatively, you can activate SearchWP manually by going to SearchWP > Add License.
Paste your previously copied license key into the “License Key” field and click ‘Verify Key’ to finalize the activation.
Your licensing information will be displayed below if the key verification is successful.
When SearchWP is installed, it starts to replace your website’s default search automatically.
Step 2: Configure SearchWP To Prioritize Specific Search Results In WordPress
Now that SearchWP has been installed and activated successfully, we can move on to prioritizing specific search results. To do that, we need to install the Custom Results Order extension.
You can do that by visiting SearchWP > Extensions, finding the Custom Results Order in the list, and clicking Install.
You’ll notice it’s installed and activated shortly after. Now we’re ready to customize the search results order. To do that, visit Search WP > Algorithm and navigate to the Custom Search Order tab.
You should now be presented with the search order configuration page.
Here, you can add the search queries you’d like to prioritize in search results. A query is a phrase or a keyword that your visitors type into the search box.
For example, we have a lot of WordPress-related posts on our website. Let’s set the highest priority for one of them so that it appears in the very first place for the query “WordPress”.
Enter “WordPress” to the query field, then click “Add Search Query” and wait a few moments.
You should now see a list of posts and pages that match the query.
Click the “Promote to Top” button next to the post or page you’d like to promote. For example, we’ll prioritize the “How To Create Advanced Search Forms In WordPress (Easily)” post.
If someday you decide to remove the post promotion, just click the “Remove Promotion” button at the top right.
Congratulations! You have successfully prioritized specific search results in WordPress. Simply repeat this process to configure custom search orders for different posts or pages. Now, let’s see if prioritization works properly.
Step 3: Verify If Custom Search Order Is Showing Properly
Go over to your website by clicking the Visit Site button under your site’s name.
In the search bar, type the promoted query you added in the previous step, which is “WordPress” in our case.
As you can see, the prioritized result appears at the top, which means everything works fine.
The above example is displaying a Live Search in action. You can create a similar search form by following this tutorial.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to prioritize specific search results in WordPress. We hope you’ll be able to leverage this feature to boost your sales. SearchWP is packed with awesome search features to help grow your business.
Get SearchWP now to provide the best search experience to your visitors!
