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.

Atlanta Georgia on CitySquares

Last week I wrote about the first stage of our national expansion to Delaware and Maryland. Well, the road trip continues further down south. As the weather in New England stays frigid we figured we would take our show on the road and head past the Mason Dixon into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.  Don’t worry Mountaineer faithful we didn’t skip West Virgina. We will be circling back.

The business count on the site is now around 5 million putting us almost a third of the way to our goal of 16 million. We will keep you posted on every step of our expansion so you know where we are going and when we will be there.  Up next we are heading to sunny Florida, home of Tim Tebow and the National Champion Gators, to finish off the East Coast. We then will jump out to the left coast and visit California, Oregon and Washington as well as a few others. So please head down to Atlanta, GA and check out AA Ok Bail Bonding, just kidding, but we did hear that Highland Tap is a great place for first dates and martinis.

– Bob

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

With this expansion we’ve had to build a new home page at the root of CitySquares.com. Historically, when you go to CitySquares.com you’d be brought directly to the Boston page on the site, or to your favorite neighborhood, if you’ve saved one. Now, the new home page will bring users to the very top of the site, and allow the drill down by state, region, city, and neighborhood. The home page is very dynamic too, with a clever Top Cities and Quick Look feature.

The real objective behind this expansion is to meet the demand we’re seeing in communities outside of metro Boston to bring our Buy Local message, local search solution there. Both businesses and consumers have made themselves heard loud and clear, and this is just a first step in meeting their needs.

With this expansion we’re following our original model of taking a bottoms-up approach to building an online community based on neighborhood and community locales. With so much data, it’s a challenge, but that’s why the product team (Bob, Justin, and Michael) has literally slept in the office to accomplish this, and they did a fantastic job! We’re very proud of those guys for their efforts and for going above and beyond to get this done.

We’re excited to see the search engines sink their teeth into this data and ultimately bring the value of CitySquares.com to consumers across the northeast! If anyone has any questions about this expansion, or about advertising, or anything else, please don’t hesitate to email me or call me at (617) 459-4922. There are some small wrinkles we need to iron out too, so expect to see some nice little tweaks over the coming days and weeks.

– Ben