Using NAICS and PSC Codes to Improve Contract Search Results

Adding NAICS and PSC codes to your keyword searches can dramatically reduce the number of bad results returned (e.g. contracts that have your keyword but that aren’t actually related to your products and services), so we recommend using them (especially PSC codes)

Here’s an example: 
1) You’re looking for cyber security contracts so you do a keyword search for “cybersecurity”
2) The search returns any contract that has “cybersecurity” in the title, abstract, or attached documents
3) Unfortunately there are federal requirements related to contractor cybersecurity compliance, and those requirements are written into lots of solicitations. 
4) So the search returns lots of contracts that have the requirement, but aren’t actually related to Cyber-security. 
5) Then you add the NAICS/ PSC codes for IT services (the codes that are typically used for cybersecurity) and the quality of the results are going to go way up since all the contracts returned will be in the IT arena, and at least mention Cybersecurity. 

So if you are getting too many results in your contract searches consider adding PSC and NAICS codes

Quick codes:

Adding a dozen codes can be tedious, so a quick way to improve your search results is to just refine based on whether you sell a product or a service.  PSC codes that start with a letter are for services, and PSC codes that start with a number are for products.  So consider filtering on products and services, this will quickly improve your search results