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searchIQ Feature Spotlight: Cross-Site Search

Rahul Arora | January 9, 2017

What is Cross-Site Search?

Cross-site functionality allows you to group as many of your websites together and display results for an entered search term. So, say you have one website dedicated to dog training and another site about dog health. It would make sense to link both of these together, as someone may search for related topics on either of these websites. You don’t want to risk losing them to another site altogether by not having them synced. This is useful to your visitor because they find the content they were looking and it makes for a great search experience.

cross site feature
In our opinion, a search engine is incomplete without this feature. The way users search content on your website has changed a lot. Today’s user expects instant and relevant results without having to do too much digging around. We believe this feature is a must-have component for any search engine to be efficient.

Implementing Cross-Site Search with searchIQ

One of the main questions we get regarding cross-search functionality is how to implement it. Let’s dive a little deeper to explain how searchIQ displays posts from multiple websites when a search is performed on a specific website.
Since this functionality is user centric, we designed this feature to focus on keeping it simple and effective. So we’ve made it incredibly simple to turn this feature on and off at your discretion.

Steps:

• Create cross-site group

create cross-site groups

• Select which search engines you would like in this site group.
• You will see the cross-site group you just created in the admin overview. Under “Show cross-site search results” turn on either or both autocomplete and search page and your search results will be synced.

cross-site enable option

Benefits

There are many reasons why one should implement cross-domain search to fine-tune their search and make it more efficient. One reason might be that you have multiple websites that have a similar theme or niche. Cross-site search will expand the search results for your users and provide them with plenty of content that might be of interest.
Another reason may be to gather more user insight by capturing search term data. Along with cross-site search, we provide cross-site analytics so you can see what visitors are looking for, what they clicked on and where (which site) they came from. This would help when optimizing your website’s content for better conversion.

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First Fridays – Plugin Edition

Noelle Festa | January 7, 2017

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January 2017 – WPtouch Mobile

First of all, Happy New Year everyone! We hope 2017 is getting off to a great start. To kick-off our first, First Fridays of 2017 we want to share a plugin that is useful for anyone wanting to be more mobile friendly… WPtouch Mobile.

This WordPress plugin provides you with a mobile friendly theme automatically. It is also customizable allowing you to make adjustments to the look and feel of your website on a mobile device. The best part about this all, you don’t have to change any code on your website’s desktop theme for this plugin to work! It’s awesome!

Require something a little more robust? You can always look into the different packages which include WPtouch Pro, business, developer and enterprise. Each one offers a little something extra, like advanced font controls and premium support.

If your website isn’t already mobile friendly, you should definitely consider installing this plugin.

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Improve Functionality of your Favorite WordPress Plugins with searchIQ

Rahul Arora | December 13, 2016

We’re proud of our search plugin! Not only are the features incredibly useful for publishers and site builders, but it also integrates nicely with other popular WordPress plugins. In most cases it makes sense to use searchIQ with these plugins, as they compliment one another. To explain what we mean we’ve decided to share some plugins we think work great with searchIQ.

bbPress

bbPress is a WordPress plugin that converts your blogging platform into a fully featured forum application. Forums are popular as they allow like-minded people to engage in a focused discussion. Most forum software is slow and hard to manage, where as bbPress focuses on speed, ease of use and integration. A new bbPress forum can easily be set up and once sub-forums and categories are added, users can start posting topics.

Forum applications by nature are search oriented, so implementing a search plugin along with bbPress is an added advantage. Using searchIQ with bbPress enhances your user experience. For example, a forum will have various sub-forums, categories and each category will have several topics making it essential for a website admin to integrate search that will display desired content. searchIQ will help the user to search on topics of interest and will help them get to that content quickly, allowing them to participate in the discussion rather than having to browse across hundreds of threads.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress sites. It is a powerful and extendable ecommerce solution with endless flexibility and access to hundreds of extensions providing complete control to the admin. WooCommerce offers various features for an online marketplace, from product to shipping. Premium extensions can also be used to offer bookings, memberships and subscriptions. You can list a product with various variations (size, color etc.), style your store, offer promo and coupons, and integrate payment gateway with shipping.

There are many benefits to using searchIQ with WooCommerce. Apart from title, body content, tags and categories, searchIQ has been designed to index product attributes, custom fields, system fields, post excerpts and taxonomies as well. Even if you have hundreds of products, searchIQ will display the desired items immediately based on the keyword(s) searched. The autocomplete feature allows users to view the most relevant products in accordance to the search term(s). This is important because you want to convert someone from a visitor to a customer as soon as possible. Get site visitors to what they are looking for fast and don’t leave them searching for long periods of time and risk losing them to another website.

Events Manager

Events Manager is a powerful and full-featured event registration plugin for WordPress. It supports almost all the features of event registration management including recurring events, calendar, location, Google map integration, booking management and more.

The event registration process is simple and the option to create single day/recurring event registration is available. Features like approvals, rejections, export CVS, template tags and short codes are available to be used in your posts and pages. It also allows you to assign and view events by location, support event categories, event custom attributes, Google maps and various widgets for events.

The advanced functionality of searchIQ further enhances the capabilities of Events Manager. As the events/locations are custom post types, searchIQ makes it easier for users to search the desired event by title or location. Apart from these fields, events can also be searched with tags, categories, and custom attributes.

WP Frontpage News

WP Frontpage News is a plugin to display latest posts from a category, page or tags. This awesome news plugin gives you the ability to display content in a dynamic way and it’s easy to navigate. This plugin was built to automatically format your content in a specified way and display more information in a limited space, which will help to catch the eye of more users and prevent a break in the layout.

A news website can’t ignore the fact that it needs efficient search functionality. searchIQ offers advanced features to give users a unique way to search news content. Synonym aliasing and relevance refinement are just a few of searchIQ’s features that would help to make WP Frontpage News content more searchable. And we can’t forget to mention real time indexing! Newsworthy stories come about at the drop of a hat, so with our real-time indexing all new posts are catalogued immediately, allowing visitors to search new articles right away.

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First Fridays – Plugin Edition

Noelle Festa | December 1, 2016

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December 2016 – BuddyPress

This December we want to feature BuddyPress! Especially around the holidays we love the idea of bringing people and communities together, and to know that BuddyPress does just that for WordPress is what we really enjoy about it.

With BuddyPress you can make profiles, groups and niche communities. You can pose questions and create unique forums where people can collaborate and share ideas. It’s a fantastic way to incorporate communication on your website or blog. If you are looking to add a social element to your website give BuddyPress a try!

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The Importance of Real-Time Analytics

Rahul Arora | November 16, 2016

What is real-time analytics you ask? Well, when you break it down “real-time” translates to instantaneously, information arrives as soon as it happens without being stored and retrieved later. Analytics is when a system processes and analyzes data or statistics to generate meaningful information regarding the captured information. So when we use the real-time analytics in regards to blogging it refers to information gathered as it happens on your website and displayed in a way that helps you see different trends, the site traffic, page views and how long each page was viewed, etc. Analytics provide value to a blogger as they can come to different design decisions, user experience decisions and content decisions based on what they analyzed with real-time analytics.

A lot of companies realize the importance of real-time analytics because it’s the best way for them to understand their user or customers. Data analysis has become an integral part of many businesses to track their audience behavior. Now companies can find accurate and relevant data instantly. Moreover, in such a competitive marketplace, having instant results drives you to redesign products and marketing plan based on the activity of your users, maybe your site is not as user friendly as you initially thought it was.

Analytics reports are gaining more focus as customer loyalty, customer retention and customer delight have become the deciding factors behind any business strategy. Here are 4 ways to benefit from real-time analytics:

Fast and Accurate Results

Classifying the data instantly, before collecting and storing in the database can be the greatest advantage for your website. Real-time analytics helps in predicting data trends, enabling decision-making quickly and efficiently as compared to conventional decisions. In real-time, data can be consulted immediately rather than waiting to retrieve and analyze data.

High performance analytics helps you take better operational decisions, improving the quality of strategic and tactical decisions. For example, a telecommunication company cut the time required to analyze the data stored in enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from 12 hours to just one minute.

Monitoring Audience Behavior

How well do you know your audience? Industry leaders have always emphasized this question. To provide the content that your visitors will find engaging and tailor it based on their behaviors, it’s very important.

Real-time analytics provides audience insights about your demographics, needs, search behavior, sessions, viewed content and social involvement, thus helping you to support your strategies. You can implement some effective real-time analytics tools on your blog or website, offering dashboards that update immediately.

Opportunity to Improve

Being able to see all roadblocks and loopholes that are frustrating for your visitors can be extremely valuable, not to mention you have the opportunity to make changes and adjustments to your site to remedy these problem areas. Insights provided in real-time (behavioral, demographical etc.) will help you make those decisions instantly.

There are so many ways to adjust your site to make it user-friendly, as you can see in this article by Kissmetrics.

Customer Satisfaction

Today, meeting your customer’s expectations is how businesses define their success. A satisfied visitor is the most prized possession.

Real-time analytics improves customer’s experience and helps to maximize customer satisfaction and market share. According to Alteryx, 63% of companies use analytics to enhance customer satisfaction.

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