Skip to main content

Search Engine Optimization

The Propcart search engine provides fast and relevant search results for your customers.

Typo Tolerance​

Typos are inevitable, and our search engine is forgiving.

  • Industry-specific Synonyms: If an item has the keyword couch (and not sofa) and someone searches for sofa, those couch items will be included in the search results. Are we missing a synonym? Let us know!
  • Exact Match Queries: Wrap "your query" in quotes to get exact matches and disable typo tolerance.
  • Negative Keywords: Prepend a hyphen to a word in a query to exclude items that contain this word from the search results. For example, the query -table lamp will exclude all items that contain the keyword "table".
  • GeoLocation: Have warehouses in different cities? Your customers will see items closest to them first by default, or they can change their location to rank that location highest.

Searchable Attributes​

These item attributes are searched and ranked in the following order:

  • Title
  • Tags
  • SKU
  • SKUs
  • Description
  • Storage Location
  • Vendor Name*
\* For the Propcart Marketplace

Item Ranking​

When a query is submitted to the search engine, the results are ranked as follows:

Typos: Results with more typos will be ranked lower.

GeoLocation: Geo-tagged results are ranked by distance to the user's geolocation, closest first.

Match Count: Number of words from the query that matched at least once.

Proximity: How physically near are the matching query of words in the item.

Position: Position of the matching words in the Searchable Attributes list. The closer the matching words are to the beginning of the attribute, the higher the ranking.

tip

When describing your inventory, put the most relevant information at the beginning. Usually this means putting nouns first and adjectives second like Lounge Chair, Eames, 1970s.

Exact: Number of query words matching exactly.

Visibility: Ranked from highest to lowest is Featured > Public High > Public > Public Low > Public Bottom.

Paid: Paid plans are ranked first, Free plan is ranked last.

Creation: Date Newest items are ranked first, oldest last.

Synonyms​

Our search engine supports synonyms, which tell the search engine which words and expressions to consider equal.

For example, sofas ↔ couches. A search for "couches" also returns "sofas", and a search for "sofas" also returns "couches".

It also supports synonym groups like:

white boards ↔ whiteboards ↔ grease boards ↔ greaseboards ↔ dry erase boards ↔ erase boards ↔ wipe away boards

Synonyms come in three flavors:

  • Regular Synonyms: if you want a word or phrase to find its synonyms and the other way around.
  • One-way Synonyms: if you want a word or phrase to find its synonyms but not the reverse.
  • Alternative Corrections: if you want records with an exact query match to rank higher than a synonym match.

We have many synonyms defined for props, but we're always adding and improving our list. Please let us know if we're missing any.