Related Content and the plugin behind it
Does your site contain ‘Related Content’ partials (sometimes also described as ‘You may also like…’ sections) at the very bottom of some posts or pages? If so, the chances are that we built this feature using the SearchWP Related Content plugin.
And if you ever find yourself wondering why a content item is pulling through to this section or whether you might be able to customise it, the good news is that the likely answer is ‘Yes!’
You’ll almost definitely find the SearchWP Related Content widget beneath the page’s content editor in the CMS. Here you can edit the keywords that the engine will use to find and display other content that your users might be interested in.
Keyword optimisation
Take a look at the example above. The widget’s keywords are auto-generated from the page/post title by default. Although this does provide a useful starting point, we might want to modify these keywords to better target some other content on our site.
This is an event post advertising a live music concert of orchestral Bollywood music and we can make this clearer in our keywords. You can see that removing/adding/modifying the keywords here has a marked effect on what is returned in the ‘Results Sample’.
It is worth noting that the ‘Results Sample’ won’t be a 100% accurate reflection of the front end display. There are search-weighting rules in play that will affect the final output. Nevertheless, it does give a good sense of how your keyword choice will take effect.
Try it for yourself. Customising your keywords should dramatically improve your related results in most cases. As mentioned, the SearchWP engine does have some more intricate search-weighting customisation available behind the scenes and the SMILE team would be happy to help you with further optimisation if needed. Please get in touch with us via Live Chat or by logging a support request.