Clevergreen is a professional eco-friendly dry cleaners that added the drop box option to make it easier for T-riders who are already helping the environment by taking the train everyday. The drop box is located by the garage at Station Landing in Wellington Circle.

CitySquares’ street team consisted of 3 members; Elcin Cetin, Amanda Guida and Marissa Green who gave out  coupons to local Medford residents. Many community members seemed really interested in the idea of Clevergreen and exciting about CitySquares, which of  course was inspiring to the optimistic spirits of the street team!

CitySquares is always excited to help local businesses get as much awareness in their community’s as possible. Street teaming is just another way we are working to make that happen.

CitySquares is looking to fill a few open positions. There are two in particular that we’re

most eager to fill. Do you know anyone for these roles? If you do, and we hire them, we’ll pay you a $500 referral fee! Check them out…

National Ad Sales Executive
ETL Engineer

October 16, 2009 marked the fourth year for CitySquares.com, a reflective milestone for co-founders Ben Saren and Bob Leland who recognize the successes and growth of CitySquares.com since its launch in 2005. CitySquares.com began as a small website with information about local businesses in seven Boston area neighborhoods to what is now a national hyperlocal resource with over 14 million businesses, tens of thousands of users, and rapidly growing traffic. Today, the CitySquares team continues the vision these two founders have spent the last four years expanding on; to ensure that neighborhood businesses get the attention they deserve.

The CitySquares.com website was founded with business profiles from only a few communities in the Boston Area. As of March 2009, CitySquares expanded across the nation and today there are over 14 million businesses on our site with over 18,000 written reviews from website users, and growing fast.

Co-founder Ben Saren says, “We both originally had a vision of helping small businesses get online exposure in a hyper-local context and now it’s not just a vision, it’s a reality.”

A little over four years ago, October 13, 2005, the CitySquares.com launch party was held in Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

There were performers from the Deborah Mason School of Dance, face painting and other activities for members of the local Davis Square community. The neighborhood warmly welcomed CitySquares into their neighborhood and lives. This assistance and the many other contributions people have made since day one for CitySquares have not gone unnoticed by either founder. Some of the first businesses to be a part of the CitySquares family include The Square Nail Studio, Massage Therapy Works and Wedgewood-Crane & Connolly Insurance Agency.

Ben Saren, co-founder and CEO, says, “The exciting thing about being a part of CitySquares is the culture, mission and approach. Everyone who has been and is a part of CitySquares helped us get to this point. I want extend a huge thank you to all of them.”

Along with the development of CitySquares, the long-lasting friendship between co-founders Bob and Ben is a model relationship for all business duos.  Bob says, “While so much has changed over the past four years, and we’ve been through so many highs and lows, our vision is being realized. We’ve come so far as a business, as a company, and Ben and I have grown so much as entrepreneurs and friends.”

Both founders are humbled by this milestone and how much CitySquares has grown over the past four years.  They are looking forward to many more years of helping small businesses get exposure, and attract the interest of their local communities and consumers.

Special thanks to Justin, Kim, Michael, and Amber, who continue to fight the good battle on behalf of Local Search and on behalf of small businesses.

Happy 4^th Anniversary CitySquares.com!

Full Time Positions

• Contract Web Developer
• Account Managers
• Contract MySQL DBA/ETL

Internships and Other Opportunities

• Marketing Intern
• QA Intern
• SEO Internship
• Graphic Design Intern
• Referral Agents

If you’re interested in any of these positions, please email us as specified in the job postings. All our jobs can be seen on our Jobs page. Please do not call us. If you’re a recruiter or headhunter, no offense but please don’t contact us. We already work with a couple of firms that we’re happy with. So thanks but no thanks!

As CitySquares.com grows we need to make sure that the site continues to be easy to navigate and that all the people who use the site can find everything they’re looking for. One of the big additions to the site is a greatly improved navigation system that makes getting from one place to another much easier. We redesigned the header area at the top of the site so it would take up less space which in turn moves important content higher up the page. Now you can just change your location by typing in the city, town or zip code directly into the ‘change location’ text box as shown in the sample below.

Speaking of improvements, we created a cleaner and simpler home page that better articulates to our neighbors and merchant audiences just what CitySquares.com is about, and what you can do. On the new home page we added a really cool ‘What’s New’ scrolling ticker so users can see, in real time, what is happening on the site. The ticker shows the latest reviews, ratings, merchant profile edits and other activities on the site. We also added a more obvious call-to-action so small businesses can quickly jump into updating or upgrading their profile. There is also a list of top cities and a prominent location text field so users may jump to the location of their choice with ease. Visit the new home page here.

We think we’ve done a great job at providing valuable business content to users but we wanted to add more fun and engaging stuff too, so users could share their favorite businesses with friends and family as well. After figuring out what we wanted, and coincidentally meeting the folks over at AgendiZe, we entered into a partnership with them to bring you just the goods we envisioned! Agendize offers a plethora of viral tools for users such as sending a text message, add to Facebook and other bookmarks as well as instant messaging, saving to Outlook and so much more. You can see a sample of it here on this profile. Just click on on the of yellow buttons below the profile information and you will get a window of options. Every single profile on CitySquares.com has these tools so please start sharing your favorite businesses.

Lastly we added national events to the site which is just one of the early steps to truly become what we’ve long envisitione – to be your neighborhood online. The events are brought to you through our partnership with another great company called Eventful. You can find local, and hyperlocal, events all across the country on all the city, town, and neighborhood pages on CitySquares.com. Go here to see hyperlocal events in Wrigleyville Chicago!

Well, that’s quite a bit since our national roll out! And that’s not it either. Very soon we’ll be rolling out even more – including hyperlocal news, community information, classifieds, and some really fun tools to allow users to find everything they need about their location on CitySquares but more specifically, in their real world, their community.

Stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the site! We’re on a mission to provide the most hyperlocal content on the web – from business info, to real community info, events, news, classifieds, you name it. We aim to be Your Neighborhood, Online! Now the fun really starts.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave some comments here! We’re always happy to chat and hear your thoughts.

Thinking back to the original concept, the very first notion of CitySquares, it seemed, at the time, like such a simple idea: provide consumers with truly local results for their search queries. For example, if I’m looking for barbers in Davis Square I expect exactly that – results for barbers in Davis Square. What I do not want in the search results is Supercuts in Malden, MA. That’s not what I asked for and it’s not helping me solve my problem! This was a frequent frustration of mine, and I soon found out that I wasn’t the only one having this problem. (see here for the full story)

Well, here we are, more than three years later and CitySquares.com is now a website with a national database of local businesses, that’s mashed up with a database of deep geographic data like cities, towns, but also neighborhoods – and neighborhood data like no one else has. And let me tell you, this is not easy to accomplish. I think it’s fair to say, no wonder why it was never done before – it’s really freakin’ hard! But we’ve done it. Well, let me clarify, we’ve only begun to do it, the soil has been poured, spread, and tilled.

The ultimate goal of this expansion was simple: to lay down the same foundation across the US that we did here in metro Boston area over the past three years. We’re learned a ton of lessons in the past three years – what to do, how to do it, and what not to do. We experimented in many ways. With those lessons learned, we made our moves slowly, learning more lessons. And now, we felt the time was right to go nationwide with those lessons learned. The result is a mashup of extremely hyper-local geographic data and small business data. All this is supported by an underlying search engine optimized information architecture.

OK I know that sounds awfully technical, so here it is in plain English: We take 16 million business listings and we match up that information with corresponding state, city, town, regional, but also deep community and neighborhood information (like neighborhood names, latitudes, longitudes, centroids, and so much more). Once those two things have been combined, which in itself is a pain the butt to do, and then pour it into our website platform, which is extremely search engine friendly.  Then we get natural/organic search rankings for these businesses, in a variety of search contexts, mostly what we like to call long-tail hyper-local search. So, voila, that is what you have today on CitySquares.com. (Sorry, I couldn’t keep myself away from being technical about it!)

It’s very interesting to see the results of this too. As we’ve started growing over the last couple of months our inbound call volume has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, it’s hard to keep up with all the emails and phone calls. This, I suppose, is a good problem to have! But what we’re starting to see are very interesting trends about the nature of the searches that result in traffic to our site, and phone calls and emails etc – and that is exactly what we expected – long-tail hyper-local search and results. Our traffic (now at > 1 million unique visitors per month, and growing extremely fast) is based on almost purely that kind of traffic.

We expect this traffic growth, which is fairly predictable, to grow very steadily over the next several months. We project approximately 10 to 12 million unique visitors/mo by the time the Red Sox are starting the postseason run. In parallel to that we are most excited about the kind of value we can provide small businesses – primarily driving traffic to small business profiles and ultimately, the real end-game, sending them business! The strategies and tactics for doing that are varied and are evolving all the time. We keep getting better at it.

So the next step for CitySquares’ website is pretty basic. We’re working on some stuff to essentially pretty ourselves up. Hey, we’re on the dance floor now, time to look the part! So we’re going to work out some bugs first, then we’re launching our partnership with Agendize, where we’ll be able to provide much more engagement types of features (you’ll see), and we’ll be upgrading business profiles, improving search, and releasing a new home page, among many other things. We’re also in talks with several different potential for content partnerships, like a national database of dining menus, events and news, reservation systems, and others. And we’ve got some other projects in the oven right now that will start to really allow people to learn more and interact with their local communities on CitySquares. Our slogan of “Your Neighborhood, Online” is a vision, one we’ve yet to realize even 30% of.

Our home market of metro Boston remains our home, and we continue to remain true and loyal to it. To all of those who’ve been with us this far, those of you in Davis Square (our official neighborhood home), Porter Square, Harvard Square, Central Square, Kendall Square, Union Square, and Inman Square, and in Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and in Boston – we thank you and we’ll continue to serve you as we always have. We’re right here in Boston’s South End! We’ll never outgrow you, we promise.

Stay tuned neighbors, the best is yet to come! And thank you for your continued support and friendship.

We’d love to field any questions you might have, so please feel free to leave your comments here!

P.S. I want to publicly congratulate our product team too (Bob, Justin, Michael, Clay) who did all this within a mere 45 days! It was no easy task, but they pulled it off and with minimal downtime or headaches. Well done guys!

Our company blog has been running for about a year or so, and it’s served us well as we’ve grown. But now, it’s time to take it to the next level. We believe in an open and candid dialog with our audience, and that’s what modern marketing is, a dialog – a conversation. One-directional marketing is dying, and it’s dying a long and slow death. Conversational marketing is here and here to stay, there’s no doubt about that.

So welcome to the new and improved CitySquares blog! There’s a much improved user interface and experience, but also a host of new features like videos, easy access to our archives, tweetbacks and tweetsuite (for you twitter users), but best of all, coming in the next few days, articles from guest writers!

We have some special guest writers lined up for you too – mostly small business owners who live this life every day, who are in the heat of the fire. They’re perspectives extend far beyond those of us at CitySquares. It’s high time that someone gives them a voice. CitySquares tries to do that through small business profiles, and we succeed in a marketing sense, but now it’s time to let them talk openly about anything and everything else on their minds – through their own eyes, as experts in their particular areas. Expect to see these folks up on CitySquares’ blog within a few short days!

The goal of this blog has always been for CitySquares to communicate with our audience, first and foremost, and that’s easy, we can do that until the cows come home. Our new goal of this blog is to continue to give you access to content that’s more important that what we might have to say. I’m confident that our guest writers, along with you’re participation on this blog (through comments and so forth) can make that happen.

As CitySquares goes national, so does this blog. If you’re interested in becoming a guest writer, please email me! We’re especially interested in hearing from small businesses all across the country, whether they’re in small rural towns or bustling urban districts. Please reach out and let me know if you want to be heard! The only requirement we have is that the topics must be within the broad spectrum of small business matters. That’s a huge range of topics – spanning from hiring practices, to marketing and advertising trends, to finding the right summer student help, to working with your town on zoning, to the green or local movements, to taxes, bookkeeping, inventory management, or anything else! There’s far too many topics for me to think of. That’s where you, the small businesses come in… join us.

It’s an exciting and busy time for the development team and we will continue to update you on what states have been launched and when. Until we are national we will do a regular update on states that go live.

To give you an idea of how we’re rolling out,  we started in the northeast, are currently knocking down the mid-Atlantic states, and making our way down the coast to Florida. We will then move west towards the great Mississippi River and then jump to the Pacific coast. We’ll be skipping over a few less populous states as we roll-out and circle back to them. Our overall roll-out plan shows us launching about 40 states in 30 days.

Please feel free to reach out with any feedback or thoughts on the expansion and wish us luck.

And last but not least, happy new year from all of us at CitySquares!

– Bob

Well, it’s three years later and this past July we expanded the site to cover to all of New England and metro NY. We are one of the top 2500 sites in the nation according to Quantcast and have hundreds of paying customers. Going national seems like the next logical step doesn’t it? What are we waiting for? Grow, grow, grow! It all sounds logical and simple but in fact it’s far from it. What makes CitySquares unique is the value we provide customers. We have cultivated the site around the local communities and earnestly want to see small businesses succeed and grow. So the question wasn’t why don’t we expand, but how do we expand and preserve the essence of who we are? It’s a tough question to answer, one that we’ve been working on for some time. We don’t want to devolve into a just a national directory where the small business is buried under the national players or where the consumer’s opinion takes priority over SMBs. We care about small businesses, they’re our priority. But we also care about real-world community, offline life.

The fact is, we’ve only begun to achieve our vision. There’s so much more for us to accomplish. Our aim is to not be just a business directory or city guide, but to be the ultimate resource for local communities. Whether a county in Montana, a borough in NY, a village in Vermont, or a neighborhood in Seattle, we want to get all the information about that community, that locale, online. Get the geopolitical information online, municipal information, local government, post office, libraries, public schools, trash and recycling collection schedules, historical facts, playgrounds, parking lots, public transportation, local school lunch menus, athletic program information, July 4th fireworks locations, and so much more. CitySquares’ vision is, and has always been, to be “Your Neighborhood, Online.” Not easy, but necessary. And it will happen.

So here we are, starting our national expansion. And why? It’s simple -  there is a need. The need for the local tractor equipment company in French Lick, Indiana to be found when someone searches for local tractor equipment in French Lick, Indiana and not find John Deere in Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s about getting these small businesses online, and allowing them to be discovered by local, qualified consumers. Period. But that’s just the beginning. The rest and the best is yet to come. It may not sound or look like much right now, but as we chug along in the next couple months, the next year, and beyond, you’ll see this ultimate vision become reality.

This week CitySquares launched an additional 1.7 million businesses to fulfill the rest of New York and New Jersey as well as the entire state of Pennsylvania. We will quickly be rolling out other states to complete the national expansion. It is an exciting time for us and it’s equally exciting to see so many small businesses, mom-and-pops, across this great nation actually get online – many of them for their first time ever! This is one small step for CitySquares, one giant leap for your communities. You just wait and see.

– Co-founders, Bob Leland and Ben Saren

Our friend Joe Grafton at Somerville Local First sent along this little tid-bit and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s just yet another reminder of the benefits of shopping locally. When you spend your hard-earned bucks locally, that’s more money for the local economy. It’s a system that benefits everyone – there’s no downside. Check it out…

There’s a new study out, further quantifies the benefits of shopping locally.  It shows that if 600,000 residents shifted 10% of their shopping locally, the community would experience tremendous economic benefits, such as:

* 1600 jobs would be created
* There would be $137 Million in new economic activity
* There would be $50 Million in new wages earned

You can find the Exec Summary and Full Report here.

– Ben