Local SEO refers to optimizing your website or blog for the specific audience that will be most likely to be looking for products or services similar to yours. For example, if you own a pet store in the city of Tampa and you decided to create a blog on the topic, would your blog traffic be better served by focusing on cat lovers or dog lovers? While the answer may seem tricky, it’s really not because search engines have recently started rewarding local businesses with more favorable search results, thus the importance of local search engine optimization to small businesses is growing quickly in order to maintain or even grow these numbers over time.