Any major digital marketing authority will preach the importance of a uniform local search presence for local businesses. There are number of posts emphasizing the need to either spend the immense amount of time to build your presence in local directories, or to pay someone to make so for you and you won’t find any contrasting opinions here.

So widely is the importance of local SEO taught, but hardly is it outlined, in plain terms, why it is important.  “It’s integral to Search engine optimization!” Why?“It will help your position!” Why? “It’s fine for Domain Authority!” Why? Since so a lot time is occupied in making sure that all directory listings are uniform across the World Wide Web, why do we obediently follow directions without understanding the reasons behind them?

Here are two similes to shed light on the why of maintaining local SEO.

Local SEO is like maintain Your Room Clean

Oftentimes people are shocked to hear how long it will take to clean up a business’s local SEO. How could it possibly take 30 hours to attach how the name and information of a company are listed online? Consider neglected local listings to be like your messy childhood bedroom.  Like cleaning up your area, the longer you’ve gone since the previous cleaning, the extra time and energy it will take to clean it. Setting up a couple local listings may not be a huge issue, just like selection up a few socks won’t take much time.

Unfortunately, most businesses have never attended to their local search presence, and that room with little socks is more like a house on an episode of Hoarders. Years and years of inconsistencies, copy, and inaccurate information has led to one giant mess. What may have taken an hour 10 time, can now be a 6 month ordeal to fix.

So instead of looking at it as an expensive and timely task, think it as making up for the years of tidying that was put off.  Even a hoarder’s home started out spotless at some point.

Local SEO is like a Bowl of Rice

Another hard aspect of local search for people to wrap their heads around is that there are no shortcuts. This is mostly true if a business’s online listings have never been attended to, yet are still thinking why a cleaning is necessary.

It’s tempting to want to go in and fix just a few listings, than travel down the rabbit hole that is a local SEO clean-up. While listings on various sites, such as Google Plus, are surely more authoritative, it is the work of the combined whole that can raise a website’s authority and increase rankings. Attending to just a couple listings would be like eating just a few grains of rice. They are independently nourishing, but the impact is not felt until there is a much larger quantity of them. Even further, inaccurate listings are similar to the rotten grains of rice that are not only harmful on their own, but also extend and detract from the rest.

So, while it is tempting to only fix a little of the more obvious issues, local SEO must be approached as an aggregate of many individuals.

Finally, if these three comparisons aren’t sufficient, consider your competitors. In online marketing, it is not only about what you are doing for your business, but what you are doing in relative to your competitors. To rank above your competitors you have to be matching their online marketing efforts and then some. Not correctly optimizing your local search listings leaves you vulnerable to be usurped in rankings. In the end, local SEO is an important part of your marketing, even if it has to be compared to abstract concepts to be understood.