SEO is marketing.  You are merely marketing a business using a digital medium, rather than a traditional offline medium.

A component of Marketing exposure.  SEO is about creating exposure.

A business exposing themselves to the right audience, buyers, where the business product or service solves a buyers problem, yields the best conversion from a lead to a sale.

Therefore, exposing a business in the right places is important offline, just like online.  Exposing your website, or rather certain webpages, in the right places on the Internet yields results.  We do this by linking one website to another, or a link from site A to mine.  The better websites that I can have linking to me, such as an attorney spending the time networking at the Chamber of Commerce rather than the mall, the better connection I will make.

These links are like endorsements, just like how word of mouth yields results in the offline world.  Websites endorsing citations and reviews for local businesses are very important in SEO for the local business results.

In SEO jargon, we build authorative links to our sites to increase our rankings in the search engine results page (SERP).

This is creating transparancy and exposure.

This is SEO 101.