SearchWP Term Synonyms

Your customers do not use your words, and you can measure it

It is the quietest gap between a shop and its audience, and the only one that can be read literally in a report.

Your catalogue says "safety footwear" and everybody types "work boots". Your product page says "single-serve capsule coffee machine" and they search "nespresso machine". You write "hooded sweatshirt" and they write "hoodie". You have the product, they want it, and your site's search returns an empty page because the two words do not resemble each other.

That gap appears in full in SearchWP's search statistics, under the dashboard menu. And this extension is what closes it: it defines synonym relationships in the index, so two words return the same thing.

What it does

• Manually defined synonyms over the search index.
• Complete term replacement, not only expansion: a word can be swapped for another before the search runs.
• Works from SearchWP's search statistics, which is where the cases come from.

Replacement is the interesting feature, and it is not obvious

Expanding with synonyms is the expected part: making "boots" also find "footwear". Useful, obvious.

What opens a different case is being able to replace the term before it gets searched. It serves what the documentation itself describes: when people search for words that are not in your index and never will be.

Three concrete examples of that.

Brands you do not stock. Somebody searches a manufacturer's name you do not carry. Instead of an empty page, that search returns your equivalent category. You are not deceiving anybody: you are showing them what you do have of what they want.

Discontinued products. Last year's model that no longer exists can lead straight to its replacement, which is exactly what the person needs to know.

Common misspellings. The ones that appear in the report over and over, misspelled the same way every time.

How this gets worked in practice

You do not fill it in beforehand imagining synonyms. It goes the other way round and takes fifteen minutes a month.

One. Open the search report and sort by the ones that returned no results.

Two. Split that list in two: the ones that are a product you should stock, and the ones that are your product under another name. The first are a purchasing decision; the second are synonyms.

Three. Add the synonyms for the second group and come back next month.

It is one of the few shop tasks where the work exhausts itself: every month there are fewer cases, because the frequent ones are already solved.

Requirements

It needs WordPress and SearchWP installed. It is an extension: without the base plugin it does nothing.

Alternatives in the catalogue

The base is SearchWP, which replaces WordPress's search engine and indexes custom fields, taxonomies and documents. This add-on only makes sense on top of it.

If your problem is exclusively the shop, there are specialist search plugins already tolerant of variants without a separate extension: Advanced Woo Search is the catalogue's most used and FiboSearch Pro stands out on enormous catalogues. Ivory Search is the lighter general option.

And if what you need is not searching better but narrowing by several criteria at once, that is filtering: YITH Ajax Product Filter and BeRocket.

To see what people search for outside the internal box too, MonsterInsights brings the reports into the admin.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work without SearchWP?
No. It is an extension of the base plugin and needs it installed.

What is the difference between expanding and replacing?
Expanding adds results; replacing changes the term before searching, useful for what will never be in your index.

Where do I get the synonyms from?
From the no-results search report. There is nothing to imagine, they are written there.

Can I use it for brands I do not stock?
Yes, by sending that search to your equivalent category rather than to an empty page.

How much work is it to maintain?
Little and decreasing: each month there are fewer cases, because the frequent ones are solved.

Is it useful for spelling mistakes?
Yes, and it is among its most profitable uses, because the same ones repeat constantly.