How The Shoot uses Relevance to improve its search results
By: Zach Conn
Tags: Search, Algorithms, Startup, No Code, Marketplaces

The Shoot is an online marketplace to find affordable, high quality photographers in your area. It was founded by Fiona MacDougall and Tristan Burns in 2019 and is based in London, United Kingdom.

Fiona and Tristan

The Shoot

Challenge: delivering a better search experience

Fiona and Tristan wanted to provide a better search experience, by improving the relevance of the search results The Shoot showed to its users.

The Shoot’s search was ranked by most recently updated. This meant “Fun, Relaxed and Documentary Engagement Photographer” would show up at the top of the search results page, because it was updated most recently.

While it looks like a nice photoshoot, “Fun, Relaxed and Documentary Engagement Photographer” was not necessarily what users were looking for.

The highest ranked listings were hidden far down the search results page, or even on page 2. Without a long scroll, you might never find them.

Scrolling to find the best search result

Since 75% of clicks generally go to the top 3 results, this meant The Shoot was losing sales.

Solution: elevating the best with Relevance

The Shoot decided to use Relevance to build a custom search ranking to determine what should appear at the top of its search results. This search ranking would include the following criteria:

Number of bookings

Number of reviews

Average review score

Newly listed

Price

The Shoot used the Relevance dashboard to implement a custom rule set that reflected these criteria.

Sample of rules

When testing out the results that came from the new search rules, the best listings started to reveal themselves. The best listing in London, “Portrait Photographer in London”, was hidden on page 4 of the old search results!

Relevance worked with The Shoot to ensure a smooth integration, by pointing searches towards Relevance to start receiving fast search results that were ordered based on the new custom rule set.

Now, users enjoy the best results, every time.

Showing the right results has a large impact. Since implementing Relevance, The Shoot has seen the following benefits:

Highly relevant results

Not losing sales due to users not finding what they are looking for

Ability to continually improve search results without coding

“We were looking for a way to improve the search rankings for our customers but were really worried that it was going to be a complex and expensive piece of work. When we discovered Relevance, we were so happy to have found a tool that is so easy to integrate and super user friendly — it can do all the things we were hoping to achieve and more. We can continue to tweak the algorithm whilst we test out which weightings work best for our customers.” — Fiona MacDougall, Co-founder at The Shoot

Even more relevant results

As new factors emerge and Fiona and Tristan learn more about their customers, they can add new search ranking rules directly from the Relevance dashboard.

For example, they will soon add the ability for photographers to sign up for a premium subscription. They would like these premium listings to get a boost in the search results. In less than a minute, they can add that rule without coding in the Relevance dashboard.

Adding a subscription scorer

With Relevance, The Shoot is able to quickly and continuously iterate to show the best photographer available to its customers.

Want to learn more about Relevance? Reach out to at hello@tryrelevance.com, or schedule a live demo here.