How to build a lead list with local businesses

Table of Contents

Most local businesses live on Google Maps, which is a great source for building a lead list for your local outreach campaigns. However, manually extracting business records from Google Maps, is a time consuming and repetitive task.

In this article I will show you how to automate the entire process in a few simple steps, so you can quickly build a targeted lead list with local businesses that includes their:

  • Company Name
  • Website
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Address
  • Social media profiles

Google Maps scraping

To achieve this you’ll need to use an app called PhantomBuster which offers a robust Google Maps scraper. If you would like to follow along, click here to sign up for a free trial account.

Once logged in, you need to head over to the Solutions page where you’ll find a list with all the available Phantoms. A Phantom is a tool which automates the process of extracting data from a specific website. In the list you’ll also find ‘Flows’ which are essentially a combination of multiple Phantoms put together to automate a larger process.

For the purpose of this tutorial you want to search for the Google Maps Search to Contact Data flow.

This flow is a combination of two Phantoms. The first Phantom extracts the search results from a Google Maps search, and the second enriches each search result with additional data about the business (e.g. business email, phone).

To begin using the flow, click ‘Use this Flow’.

Perfect! So you should now be on a page that looks something like this:

Setting up the scraper

The first step to setting up this Phantom is specifying your Google Maps search query. You have a few options to choose from:

Option 1: Enter a search keyword

If you are looking to target business that might fall under a specific Google Maps search term, this option is by far the easiest. For example, let’s say you are looking to build a list with all the coffee shops in London. You can enter ‘London Coffee Shops’ as you search keyword.

❌ Even though this is an easy option to get started with, I do not recommend it because there is no definition of a search area. For example, ‘London Coffee Shops’ might return a list of ‘Coffee shops in New York with the word London in their name’.

Option 2: Enter a Google Maps search URL (recommended)

This is a great option for extracting a list of businesses that you have already found on Google Maps. Here’s how it works:

  1. Open Google Maps and perform a search that give you a list of businesses that you want to target.

  2. Copy the URL.



  3. Paste the URL in the PhantomBuster search box.

 

Option 3: Enter a URL of a Google Sheet or CSV file containing a list of Google Maps search URLs

This option is an extension of option 2 and will allow you to extract the results of multiple searches, at once. This is great if you are looking to build a list with mutliple types of businesses, or cover a larger area on the map. Here is the process:

  1. Create a new Google Sheet, add a column (you can call it whatever you like) and create a new row for each Google Maps Search URLs that you would like to extract the results of.

  2. Change the sharing settings of the Google Sheet so it is publically accessible (this is so PhantomBuster can read it).





  3. Copy the Gogole Sheet link and paste it in PhantomBuster.



  4. Select the name of the Google Sheet column that contains the search URLs

 

Once you have your search criteria defined you can proceed to the next step by clicking ‘Save’.

Here you’ll need to select the browser’s language (you can experiment with this option to see if the results alter based on the language you select), and the number of businesses you would like to extract from each search. Google Maps displays a maximum number of 200 results per search. To increase the number of extracted businesses in your list you will need to provide the Phantom with multiple search URLs.

Click ‘Save’ to proceed.

On the next page this is where the configuration of the second Phantom in the flow begins.

The second Phantom is responsible for enriching your Google Map search results with additional information about each business. Select which additional data points you would like to collect for each business.

For the phone number you also need to also select the country format. If you wish to only collect phone numbers based on the country that the businesses are located in, select that country.

You are almost done. Click ‘Save’ to proceed.

In this last page you can select the events you would like to be notified about. I recommend choosing ‘In case of error’ so you receive an email if your Phantom breaks for any reason.

You also have the option to adjust some more advanced settings such as proxies and execution times. I wouldn’t worry about this if you are just starting out. However, these settings will definitely come in handy if you are planning on scaling your Phantom and very large number of businesses. You can learn more about proxies here.

An important setting though is ‘Folder Management’. Here you’ll nee to choose how you would like to structure the files that are generated after each execution of your Phantom. By default all results will be added to one file. If you wish to create separate files for each execution, you can select ‘Create new files at each launch’.

Once you have everything configured, click ‘Save’ to proceed to the next step where you will launch your Phantom flow.

Congratulations! 🎉 Your Phantom flow is ready for launch!

Launcing the scraper

Click the switch button to initiate it, sit back and watch your Google Map search results come in. This will take a few minutes depending on how many results you have requested to extract from each search URL.

A list of search results will soon appear. Initially, you might not see the additional data points you have requested (e.g. email, facebook URL). This is because the data enrichment Phantom runs a few minutes after the Google Maps scraper Phantom.

Once your the scraping and data enrichment processes are completed, you will be able to see a list of all your results on this page. 

To download the results you can click on the Download CSV button.

You can now have all the data you need to begin your outreach to local businesses.

Your Phantom will now live on your account’s dashboard and you can switch it on whenever you want to extract new data.

To view your search results you can click on the title of the Phantom, and to edit the configuration settings you can click on the three dots and then ‘Setup’.

I hope you found this tutorial useful!