General search results not showing when typing tags

We’ve found that the general search bar that appears at the top of the home page just doesn’t find businesses with tags, when you type that tag into the search.

For example in our categories we have listings within the category of “Plumbing”. However, if someone was to type into the search for “Plumbers” they will only find ones who have “plumbers” in their business title, or within the post content.

In order to allow people to find them in this way I thought adding tags for other similar terms and adding them to the posts would solve this problem. However when running the search again after giving all the plumbers the “plumbers” tag, it is still only finding those with the term in their title or post content.

I tested this with the sidebar widget to also find search results based off ALL Custom Fields (which didn’t include tags associated with the post), and I also tried to base it on the tags which works, but then wouldn’t work when searching for a business name.

As a work around I created two search options. One based on the listing titles, and one based off the tags, however I’d then have to enter all the current categories as a tag also for this to function properly, so isn’t ideal.

Would be much easier if the general search could just pick up both matches within the post title and also posts within a matching tag.

Is this possible?

I’ve looked through all the options and can’t see anything obvious to include looking for posts associated with tags when searching.

I have downloaded the Swiftype plugin to try and counter this and while it works brilliantly. It caused an issue on the results page whereby the Premium listings were not listed at the top. There is the option to reorder the search result, which again is a great function, however if there are several featured listings to appear at the top, we need them to randomly rotate which the theme seems to do well, when clicking onto the categories. This plugin route is also decreases the automation of the process!

Any ideas or suggestions are most welcome and appreciated.