Developing keyword lists for products, brands or organizations is problematic. One answer is to use the old sales and marketing trick of not selling the product, but the benefits it can provide.

We suggest that keywords can be chosen based on:

● explicit keywords, which directly describe the product, e.g. “plumber in Sofia”

● problems keywords, which describe the conditions the product solves, e.g. “flooded bathroom”

● symptoms keywords, which describe the problem, e.g. “leaking pipe joint”

● product names and part numbers, which are the actual product names and/or part numbers, e.g. “pipe joint 234/567B”.

Keyword problems do not end there, however. The level of competition in the market is also a consideration. If your product is represented by popular keywords then your website is competing with every other website that has been optimized for the same term. This is particularly true if you sell a product with a generic identification – such as smart phone, hotel or insurance. One way out of this is to optimize for phrases (combinations of keywords) that searchers might use the so- called long tail of keywords. The long tail concept refers to search terms that are not the most common for a given item, but are more specific to what is being sought.