Search not working

Hello!

Search for Pamela in everywhere gets results, shows Pamela’s listing.

If you have “Near Me” results turned on, then, yes, it will only return results near to the person doing the searching.

For many directories just starting out, the answer is to A) add listings in a small territory and B) turn off ‘near’ features if there is a chance the search results will be empty. Further C) if you want to make sure visitors land on a Listing page (for a location or a category) then give them those links so they can click there.

If, as you say, you want users to find something in a town, give them a link to the page for the town.

In cases like yours, where you want to run a national directory, but don’t have many listings yet, or even if you do, the Near Me features are not really very helpful. Your users will get ‘more better’ results if they are always searching ‘everywhere’, at least more results like the kind they are expecting.

Hello!

I think that you are wanting to always have every search submitted to ‘everywhere’ as opposed to just ‘Devon UK’. When users search devon, they are seeing results for Devon USA (where there are no listings). GD was designed for a wide range of uses, but, if you don’t have a directory that is intensely filled with local listings in a single area, then some of the features may seem to be working against you. In the following response I will detail a recipe so that any search that is submitted is always searching ‘everywhere’.

The feature of GD that is creating the confusion is that anytime a visitor goes/switches to a ‘location’ (like Devon) (just by visiting a page like mysite.com/plaes/uk/devon), then the visitor’s ‘location’ is now set (in a session variable) to be ‘devon’. If they make another search before returning to the main location page (‘mysite.com/location’) then they are ‘only’ searching within ‘devon’.

So, if you want to make it more likely that your visitors are always searching ‘everywhere’, there are a couple things you can do.

You can hide the Near search field that comes packaged with the Location Manager. That is the field on the right with the compass button. There is no way to remove this without customization, but you can hide it with CSS. Add the following to GD > Design > CSS

.gd-search-input-wrapper.gd-search-field-near {
    display: none;
}

Now that the field is hidden, users will simply submit their search to ‘everywhere’ and find the listings returned by search, regardless of the location.

Make sure to turn off geolocation and redirection. If geolocation is on, then thevisitor immediately gets their ‘location’ set, and their search will be submitted only to ‘devon’, if that is the closest city to their location.

Next, become familiar with mysite.com/location
When a visitor goes to this page, their location is reset to ‘everywhere’. If a user accidentally gets to a page like mysite.com/places/uk/devon, we know there next search on the home page will only search Devon … unless they go to the location page (mysite.com/location) and search there.

The location page (/location) is a listing page, using the listing template, so, make sure you have the widgets there that you need to show your wide variety of listings. You can use the GD Popular Posts or GD Listings widget, moving them into the Listing page.

Next, you can help steer visitors away from the location pages like mysite.com/places/uk/devon by removing links to those pages, and specifically not using the location switcher. If they never get geolocated, and never land on a location page like ‘devon’ then their searches will always submit to ‘everywhere’ and the expected results will be returned.

To get ‘aggressive’ with this strategy you can also remove the links from the breadcrumbs so the visitor can’t click on the country/region/city with this CSS:

.post-type-archive-gd_place .geodir-breadcrumb ul li {
    pointer-events: none;
}

Let us know how it goes

Related Links
https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/search-filters-overview/
https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/multilocations/

Hello!

should have mentioned the center of ‘everywhere’ is the lat/lon of your default location.

Let us know how it goes!