How to Get Leads From Google Maps (and What to Do With the List)
· 4 min read
A map listing is a ready-made lead: a business name, an address, usually a phone number, often a website, opening hours and reviews from real customers. If you sell to local businesses, that is more than most paid databases give you, and it is current because customers and owners keep it up to date.
The hard part is not finding listings. It is turning them into a list you can trust, without breaking a rule on the way.
Three ways to collect them
By hand. Search a trade and a city, open each listing, copy the details into a sheet. It is slow, but for ten or twenty businesses it is the most reliable way, and you read every listing as you go.
With the official interface. Google offers an API for places, billed by the request, with its own terms about what you may store and for how long. It suits a product that shows places to users. For building a cold-outreach list, read the terms before you plan around it.
With a tool that reads the public pages. Many scrapers and browser extensions do this, and most search results for this topic are pages from the people who sell them. Google's Maps Platform terms restrict copying map content in bulk, and that applies to the tools as well. Whether to use one is your decision, made with the terms in front of you. If you want a source with a published licence you can read and follow, look at open data such as OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps. Coverage varies by place and trade, and each has its own licence conditions.
What to collect
Keep the fields that decide whether and how you write:
- name, address, category
- phone number (and whether it is a mobile or a landline)
- website, if any, and any email printed on it
- rating, number of reviews and the date of the latest one
- opening hours
- where each detail came from, so you can trust it or not later
Filters that find the businesses you can help
The same list answers different questions depending on what you sell.
| You sell | Look for |
|---|---|
| Websites | No website, or a link that leads to a social page only |
| Website redesigns | A site that is slow, outdated or hard to read on a phone |
| Reputation and reviews | Good work but few reviews, or a low rating with a reply gap |
| Local SEO | A listing with missing hours, photos or categories |
| Booking or chat tools | Phone-heavy trades with no way to book or ask online |
Work one trade in one city at a time. A list of forty plumbers in one town beats four thousand "businesses" in a country.
Clean the list before you use it
Raw map data has problems. Clear them first:
- Closed businesses. A listing may say "permanently closed", or the last review may be years old.
- Duplicates. The same business can appear twice with different spellings: why the same business keeps showing up.
- Chains. The person who answers does not decide on a website or a tool.
- Landlines. A text to a landline goes nowhere: how to tell a landline from a mobile number.
- Wrong emails. An address printed on a site can be dead: how to check a business email address.
Rank, then write to the top
You cannot write to everyone at once. Put the best first: reachable by phone, recent reviews, a clear gap, an independent owner. What "high priority" really means for a scraped lead shows how to score without software.
Maps are not the only source
Some businesses have no listing at all, especially new ones and home-based ones: finding local businesses with no map listing. And Google, Bing and Apple Maps do not list the same places.
Doing it at scale
AyePin searches Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps and open data for a trade and a city, in the order you choose. A business found twice becomes one lead, closed ones are left out, landlines get no text drafts, and each field keeps the source it came from. It then reads what the business publishes about itself and drafts a first message from those details. Every draft waits in the Outbox until you approve it.
Before you write to anyone
- Know the rules for where the business is: CAN-SPAM, GDPR and PECR.
- Keep a record of where each address came from.
- Send in small, steady numbers: how many cold emails you can send per day.