Keymatch

What is keymatch?

The order of your search results is determined by a relevance score that Pandosearch calculates. This usually works very well, but sometimes a page is more relevant to users than its organic ranking would suggest.

In this case, you can use the Pandosearch keymatch feature. Keymatch is used to force a page to come out on top for a certain search. Keymatch is available to all Pandosearch users by default.

Using Keymatch

Using Keymatch is easy:

1. Adding keymatch to your content

Modify the content of the page to which you want to apply keymatch, so this page contains the tag for keymatch. This is done using a so-called <meta> tag in the <head> of the HTML. For example:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta name="keymatch" content="term, term with spaces"/>
    ...
  </head>
  <body>...</body>
</html>

The way you can get this into the HTML depends on the content management system (CMS) you are using. Please contact your website administrator to determine how this can be set up on your website.

2. Waiting for crawl and checking

Now it is a matter of waiting for the crawler to find the modified page and update it. Wait for a crawl that started after you changed the HTML to finish. You can keep an eye on this through the Crawlers page of the Pando Panel.

If you then go to the Diagnostics page for this URL, the content of this keymatch field should also be visible under “Content”.

If all of this is in order, the page with this keymatch should come up on top when you search your website for the keymatch term set.

Example

As an example, we will take a refrigerator dealer who sells many different refrigerators on his site. When a visitor to his site searches for the word “refrigerator”, he wants his page with a list of all the refrigerators at the top of the search results. He decides to use keymatch for this.

He adds the keymatch tag to his page and immediately includes a few relevant conjugations.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>All our refrigerators</title>
    <meta name="keymatch" content="refrigerator, refrigerators, all refrigerators"/>
    ...
  </head>
  <body>...</body>
</html>

After putting the modified page online, he waits while the crawler does its work. After 24 hours, he looks in the Pando Panel and can see on the Diagnostics page that the keymatch has been added. As a final check, he performs a search for “refrigerator” and sees the “All our refrigerators” page come up nicely at the top.

Pitfalls

Too much keymatch

If you overuse a specific keymatch term, your top results for that search will only consist of keymatch results. You can then no longer determine what the top page will be. It is not possible to determine the individual order of results with the keymatch feature.

As a rule of thumb, it rarely makes sense to use the same keymatch term on three or more pages. Before putting the same keymatch on several pages, it is recommended to consider which of these pages you really want to have on top.

Keymatch does not take conjugations and synonyms into account

Normally, Pandosearch will consider conjugations of words. When someone searches for ‘refrigerator’, a page with ‘refrigerators’ on it is found. You can also enter synonyms on the admin panel, which means that words in search queries are equated with each other. Keymatch does not take these conjugations and synonyms into account. This is to maintain a strict link between the search term and forced result.

Look critically at the content first before using keymatch

If a certain page does not come top for a keyword you would expect, this could be a sign that this word is not present (often enough) in the page content. In that case, take a critical look at the content first. Perhaps you can restore the order organically by including more relevant content or meta-keywords.

The ranking in Pandosearch can be adjusted with keymatch, but other external search engines such as Google do not consider this. By modifying the actual content, you can also benefit from this from an SEO point of view!