Searchanise Review: A Huge Upgrade to WooCommerce Search

If you run a WooCommerce store, product search is an important, but sometimes overlooked, part of increasing your store’s conversion rates.

If you want a customer to make a purchase, that customer needs to be able to find the exact products they’re most interested in. Makes sense, right?

Well, your WooCommerce product search is a big part of what helps them do that. Unfortunately, though, the built-in WooCommerce product search is pretty barebones and lacks a lot of helpful features.

In our Searchanise review, I’ll take a look at a plugin that changes that by helping you add a more shopper-friendly product search with autocomplete, search suggestions, and lots more.

Searchanise is a lot more than just a search tool, though – it also includes some really advanced features to help you promote your most profitable products, boost your conversion rates, and analyze what’s happening with search on your site.

Overall, I was impressed by the depth of functionality and the polish in the interface, so this is definitely one to take a look at if you have a WooCommerce store.

Searchanise Review: The Feature List

Searchanise is not a single feature – it’s a full search solution that’s designed to actually convert more visitors into buyers. That is, it covers everything from offering a more comprehensive search algorithm to improving performance, tracking analytics, adding new features, promoting products and more.

Put all those features together and you have a set of tools that can make a meaningful difference on your store’s shopping experience and bottom line.

Let’s run through the features first and then I’ll show you them in action on my own WooCommerce store…

1. Full Text Search Without Slowing Your Site Down

Searchanise offers full-text search to help shoppers find products without slowing your site down.

Here’s how that works:

Searchanise indexes your store’s products, articles, and categories on Searchanise’s servers rather than your own. This means that it can scale up to 100,000s of products and tons of queries without killing your store’s server.

Indexation happens in near real-time (every 10 minutes) so your search will be updated as soon as you add new products or edit existing products.

By default, Searchanise will search in…

• Product name
• Description
• Product type
• Vendor
• Tags
• SKU for all product variants
• Barcode for all product variants
• Options for all product variants

And you can also tell Searchanise to search in custom fields by using its settings.

New Features: Instant Search, Search Suggestions, Redirects + More

Searchanise comes with a suite of features to help create a more shopper-friendly search:

• Instant search – instantly show products in the search results as soon as a shopper starts typing.
• Extra product details – include a product’s price, in-stock status, and product reviews in the search results page.
• “Did you mean?” suggestions – give shoppers suggestions to avoid having them hit a dead end.
• Synonyms – use smart synonyms to help get shoppers to the right place. For example “male” vs “mens”.

Searchanise doesn’t just change the search form, it also changes your search results page and adds new faceted search options there to help shoppers further drill-down in the search results:

3. Product Promotions

Beyond helping shoppers find products, Searchanise also helps you promote products by letting you promote certain products or categories of products in search results.

For example, you can automatically rank a specific product at the top of the search results for certain keywords and you can also redirect certain keywords to dedicated product landing pages.

4. Detailed Lifetime Analytics

On the backend, Searchanise provides you with really detailed analytics for how your search functions. It does a lot more than just tracking search terms – you can track:

• Instant search hits
• All searches
• Searches that returned 0 results
• Search suggestions
• Products

You can use these analytics to help you understand what shoppers are looking for…and what you might be missing.

Hands-On With Searchanise

Now that you know the features, let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you how Searchanise works at my WooCommerce store.

As soon as you activate the Searchanise plugin, it automatically starts working by indexing your content on Searchanise’s servers. Additionally, it replaces the native WooCommerce search feature, so any existing WooCommerce search widgets that you have will automatically start using Searchanise – here’s how it looks by default:

It also replaces your search results page. Here’s how that looks by default on my test site:

From there, you’ll manage most of your settings from the Searchanise dashboard, which you can find by going to Products → Searchanise.

Searchanise Dashboard

The Searchanise dashboard gives you access to most of the features, divided into tabs on the left:

In general, Searchanise gives you a ton of control over both the style and function of its many features.

Let’s circle back to the analytics options after taking a look at the other stuff.

The Instant search widget and Search results widget areas let you control the design and function of both your search box and search results page (which I showed you above):

You also get that Optimize for phones and tablets feature, which is a really neat tool to create an optimized mobile search.

Preferences and Filters

The Preferences area lets you control what content to include in search results. For example, you can include/exclude specific:

• Product fields
• Categories of products
• Regular WordPress pages

The Filters tab lets you choose which filters to offer on the search results page:

Fancy Wordplay

The Suggestion dictionary, Synonyms and Stop words tabs give you some very specific ways to handle search terms.

The Suggestion dictionary lets you suggest your own terms, which you can use to drive traffic towards important queries. You can even change a suggestion’s priority:

The Synonyms feature lets you define your own synonyms. For example, you could treat “mens” and “male” as the same:

And the Stop words feature lets you define special words that should be disregarded during search.

Promotion Tools

The Merchandising and Redirects features give you some neat ways to promote products or categories of products.

With Merchandising, you can promote specific categories of products or products in your search results. For example, you can tell Searchanise to rank a specific product at the top of the results whenever certain keywords are met.

As you can see in the image below, you get five different levels of promotions:

I think this is a really neat way to drive traffic towards your most profitable products.

The Redirects tool is another feature that can help you do that. It lets you redirect certain keywords to a specific page, which you can use to create dedicated promo pages for certain products or categories of products:

Analytics

Finally, there’s the real-time Analytics area which gives you a detailed look at how people use your store’s search and how effective your store’s search is.

As I mentioned before, it’s a lot more than just tracking search terms. It can tell you things like:

• Top overall queries
• Which search suggestions people click on
• Which products people click on in instant search
• Which searches resulted in 0 results

You can use these to draw some really helpful insights about what your shoppers are looking for (and what your store is missing).

Searchanise Pricing

First off, Searchanise offers a 14-day free trial, so you can sign up and test out all the premium functionality without needing to pay.

From there, Searchanise has a limited free plan as well as premium plans.

The free plan offers basic search features to small WooCommerce stores with up to 25 products (it supports unlimited searches – the only limit is the products). If your store has fewer than 25 products, that might be all you need.

If you have a larger store and/or you want access to the advanced features, Searchanise’s paid plans start at just $9 per month for up to 500 products paid monthly or $6.30 per month paid annually (you get a 30% discount for annual payments).

Final Thoughts on Searchanise

Overall, I was quite impressed by Searchanise.

Searchanise is more than just a tweak to the native WooCommerce search – it’s a complete suite of tools to help your shoppers find the products they’re interested in and to help you sell more products.

At a basic level, it improves your search with features like:

• A more comprehensive search
• Better-performing search because indexing happens on Searchanise’s servers
• Live search suggestions
• Custom search widget and search results pages, complete with lots of product filters

But it also goes beyond just improving search – it also helps you market your products. For example, the merchandising and redirects tools help you drive attention towards your most popular and profitable products.

Plus, you get those detailed analytics and everything is nicely wrapped up in a well-designed interface.

If you have a WooCommerce store, I definitely think you should give Searchanise a look. You can get a 14-day free trial – no credit card required – so you’re not risking anything by signing up:

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