Regular readers of our SEO company’s blog know that we were at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference this week, and we attended some great sessions, especially the ones that covered blogging for business and online reputation management.

People are talking about you and your company online. They might be discussing your products, reviewing your business, or sharing their experience with your brand(s). Regardless of what they are saying, you should be involved in the conversation - or at the very least, you should be monitoring it.

Our SEO company has been getting a growing number of inquiries from businesses looking for online reputation management services; considering the ever-increasing ubiquity of the internet, these requests are unsurprising - everyone wants to essentially “own” the search results for their brand.

Reputation management is one of the major buzzwords in the online marketing community these days - it seems that you can’t visit an SEO blog without coming across posts entitled “The Importance of Reputation Management” or “Top Ten Reputation Management Techniques” or similar. Our SEO company has even written about managing your reputation online on more than one occasion.

Reputation management, search engine optimization, and internet marketing should all be PRO-active, not reactive. Unfortunately, many companies do not seek out SEO or reputation management consultants until it is too late - until after they’ve gotten bad press or numerous negative reviews already, and now they need an SEO company to step in and fix the situation.