How to improve site search (internal search)

Owned by Jo Tayler
Last updated: 11 Dec, 2024
2 min read

SDP uses Elastic App Search for site search.

For vic.gov.au and other websites managed in content.vic.gov.au, the SDP content team looks after:

  • curations

  • synonyms

  • relevance tuning

For information on improving your external search results (e.g. Google), see our SEO guides linked below.

Curations

We can nominate specific pages to come up at the top of site searches for a term or phrase. This overrides the relevance tuning built into the search engine.

To decide on useful curations to add to your site, you should:

  • identify the top user search terms for internal site search

  • test them on your site and see if the most appropriate results are being returned

  • make a list of the pages you want to appear at the top of search results for each term/phrase.

Note that curations don’t affect Google search results, only searches made on an SDP site.

Top user search terms

To identify top user search terms, look at the search tab on the Looker Studio dashboard for your site (e.g. this is the dashboard for vic.gov.au). Make sure you set the date range to at least 6 months, unless the term you’re

How to request curations

Submit a support request with the following information:

  • search term (single words only)

  • your top 3 pages for this term

  • the CMS link for these top 3 pages

You can use this spreadsheet template to provide the above information.

If you’re requesting curations, it’s a great idea to take a screenshot or record in some way how your search terms were performing before the change so you and after so you can assess whether the curation is working how you want.

Synonyms

Synonyms can only be single words. They can be useful for frequently used jargon or abbreviations, such as ‘kindy’ or ‘elc’ for ‘kinder’ (the term mainly used on http://vic.gov.au ).

Relevance tuning

This is a way of ranking the importance of specific fields in the CMS. The search engine will prioritise looking in those fields for the search term. For example, title and summary would be the top fields.

Once this has been set up there shouldn’t be any need to update this.

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