Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Backlinko has a great guide on link building for e-commerce, you can try guest blogging, create infographics and share to your audience or list on appropriate directories (we are a UK manufacturing business and we list on madeinbritain campaign and construction.co.uk, for example)

We are a PVC strip curtain manufacturer, so on social media, we try and find angles that will interest our customers without being too much about sales all the time. Twitter and LinkedIn work best for us at the moment but we do have a platform on Facebook and Google+, it's a good idea to get involved with people in a similar field who aren't competitors as we try to speak to other UK manufacturers to try and build followers. On Twitter, try and get involved in the # hours (#madeinbritainhour, #ukbizlunch, #ukmanufacturinghour etc) as a way to introduce your business to the community. What we find works best for us, as we are limited on the products we can talk about, is focus on creating content (most recently we posted an article about preparing your pub for summer - including PVC strip curtains in the article) and targeting whoever posts #pub / groups on LinkedIn that are in that field.

https://www.diygenius.com/10-free-online-courses-in-social-media-and-inbound-marketing/
Take a look at this guide and see if any of these courses help you kick start your social media profiles!

If you have a Google Search Console account, I would suggest looking at the data highlighter. This picks out key bits of information on products like price, description, etc. and allows Google to recognise these key points throughout your website. It would also help to have schema implemented (if you use Google's structured data testing tool, you'll find this easier!) and potentially enrol yourself in Google merchant centre where you can pop up in the shopping tab.

Hope this helps a little - can't recommend utilising Google Search Console enough, such a great free tool.

Create unique content for the blog/social media to achieve links... Use websites like rawshorts.com (video animation website) and canva.com (infographics), both are free and require no downloads but will help you to create unique content that may be shared/gain links if helpful to your audience.

Hi all,

We're a small business based in the UK that manufactures a range of PVC strip curtains and rubber site safety products. We have a presence on twitter, facebook, LinkedIn & google+... I've been considering Instagram for a little while now as I know we would have plenty to post (strip curtains are seen in multiple industries, it'd be great to post unusual applications that we've supplied to...) but I'm wondering what experience anyone has had with Instagram in an industrial manufacturing business... Is the audience there or would it be a waste of time for us? I've briefly looked through # but I'd like to know first-hand experiences!

Infographics are always a good place to start, sharing them on social media and e-shots. Blogging is a key way though, we face the same trouble of having to write content for products that don't gain many links however you can always be a little more creative with the blogs. We published an article on our PVC strip curtain range featuring in movies and tv shows and simply published it on social media, unique and fun but also breaks up the salesy blog posts too! Perhaps take a look at health and wellbeing blogs/websites and try to work with them to create a post on comfort in the workplace? (office chairs encouraging good posture and avoiding back pain, etc). Infographics can be created to be small help/info guides like top 10 products in office/spend vs splurge on office equipment etc. I think content/blogs are the best bet to gain links to a product page but it'll take a bit of brainstorming to come up with new and unique ideas - start your thought process with 1) what blogs are published about this product 2) what do my competitors do 3) what do my customers want (key questions asked on google) 4) how can i make this interesting and creative.

Hope this helps!

I think the best option is to respond to the rating, just to give the chance to change that 1* to 5* if it was a genuine rating. the response you have mentioned is straightforward enough, but I think you should definitely encourage other customers to review on GMB - just to even out the one star if your anonymous reviewer isn't willing to rectify the rating. In our case, it's definitely helped us stand out against our competitors on maps listings so maybe it can do the same for you?

I think the way you are handling it is fine - other than speaking to Google, I don't think there isn't really much else to do but try to rectify the issue with the customer (if genuine) and build ratings to receive 5* on GMB.

I don't think that total word count is TOO much of an issue for e-commerce, however, it is key to have enough detail as possible in the description. We have products that we can't really go too much into detail as there isn't much to say, we can only write enough to ensure the pages are unique and descriptive enough to explain to the customer exactly what the product is, but often the word count is between 100-150. A key part of ranking for e-commerce is ensuring headers, page length, meta descriptions etc all up to par and make sure the page is as user-friendly and easy to navigate as possible.

We like to refer to this as a checklist when checking our product pages are as good as they can be. 
https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/seo-best-practices-ecommerce-product-pages

May be worth trying Linked In Learning - it's a monthly subscription (premium linked in) but there is a large bank of training and courses to work through.
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/

Only one of our main keywords has made a huge jump when checking today, we hit a bit of a low in late September and hit 25 now it's jumped to 15 after little movement (varying between #22 - #28)... Not sure whether this could be algorithm based but certainly caught my attention today!