Search: Redirects
In this guide, you can read and learn about search and how to set up a search redirect.
What is Search?
The Hello Retail Search can deliver strong search results. This is done by Hello Retail constantly monitoring the products in your webshop and thereby presenting them in the search based on relevancy and popularity.
In the cases where you would like to make direct changes to the behavior of the search, it is possible to create redirects.
What is a Redirect?
A use case for a redirect one such scenario could be that you become aware that customers are using the search to find something other than products. Hello Retail's system is focused on products, so if you have pages with other kinds of information about your shop, Hello Retail might not be able to help your customers find those pages automatically. Take, for example, a page with opening hours of support information. If a customer searches for "opening hours", Hello Retail will try to match that search term with products with both or either word in any text associated with those products. Of course, that is not what the customer wants to see.
How to Create a Redirect
- Start by logging into your Hello Retail account. On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the On-site section, click on Search to unfold the drop-down menu.
- Next, from the drop-down menu, click on Redirects.
- In the Overview, click on the Add new redirect button.
- Then you need to configure your redirect inside the Configuration view. Give it a name and input it into the Title field, then enter the URL you want to redirect your customer to, and, finally, add Search word(s) searching for which the customer is redirected to the URL you specified. Click on the + button to keep adding more words to the redirect.
- Click on the Create button. You will then be able to see it in the overview of redirects. Now all searches for the added search words will result in the customer being sent directly to the targeted URL.
- If you want to get insights into what customers might be searching for then navigate to the dashboard view.
- On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the Search section, click on Analytics.
- Inside the Analytics view, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page to see Top searches without results and Top searches. In this way, you can understand and learn more about the customer's searches.
Below you can see an example of a redirect used with Overlay Search.
Wildcards
You can add wildcards to the search words. This is to make sure that alternative endings are also included.
You can use an asterisk (*) at the end of a word. By doing so, this means that any word including this * will be included in the redirect.
For example: if you add the word open*, the will mean that any ending of the word will be included in the redirect. Then, if a customer searches for "opens", "opening", "openinghours" or whatever that starts with "open", the redirect will be effectuated.
You can also add the asterisk at the beginning of a word, or both.
Other Examples
You can add a redirect to shipping information, an About page about your shop, a page with your address, or basically any page your shop might have that contains something other than products.
If you have a launch page for a new product line, you can also direct customers to that page, when searching for relevant search terms.
You can add anything you want, but be cautious not to add search words that would otherwise lead to products that the customer was actually searching for.