Hey there! As someone who has spent years in the web scraping and data extraction space, I know how valuable business contact information is for things like lead generation and sales outreach. But getting complete, accurate contact data at scale can be challenging.
That‘s where Google Maps comes in. While Google Maps doesn‘t contain full contact details, you can combine its listing data with a bit of web scraping to build comprehensive lead lists.
In this guide, I‘ll share insider tips and exactly how to extract emails, social profiles, addresses and phone numbers from Google Maps. Let‘s dive in!
Why You Can‘t Get Everything You Need from Google Maps Alone
With over 200 million business listings, Google Maps is a goldmine of basic information like names, addresses and phone numbers. But it has some key limitations:
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No email addresses – For cold outreach, email is crucial but Maps doesn‘t provide it.
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Minimal phone numbers – Maps often only shows the main number, not direct lines.
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No social media – Links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are missing.
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Inconsistent accuracy – User generated Maps data can sometimes be incomplete or outdated.
This forces people to manually search and compile contact details from other sources. But for large lead lists, this wastes tons of time!
Surprisingly, even for a tech giant like Google, only 27% of local business listings on Maps contain an email address. And that number drops to 17% for social media links according to recent LeadIQ research.
So how can you efficiently get the email addresses, direct dial phone numbers, social profiles and other contact data you need? Here’s the secret…
Augment Google Maps with Web Scraping to Get Complete Data
The key is to combine the breadth of listings on Google Maps with web scraping of business websites to get full contact details.
This involves:
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Step 1) Use the Maps API or a scraper tool to extract basic listings from Maps
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Step 2) Feed those listings into a web scraper to enrich with additional details from sites
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Step 3) Merge the Maps info and scraped details into a complete business contacts database
Following this process allows you to tap into the power of Maps while overcoming its contact data limitations through targeted website scraping.
Extract Business Listings from Google Maps
First, let‘s look at ways to get our initial business listings data from Google Maps:
Use the Google Maps API
The Maps API allows you to directly search for and extract business listing information to use in your own applications.
With the Places API, you can query businesses by:
- Keyword/category (ex. "coffee shops in New York")
- Location coordinates
- Proximity search via lat/lng points
The API returns data including names, addresses, phone numbers and Maps URLs for each listing matching your criteria. They even provide a Places API demo page so you can easily test searches.
Leverage Ready-to-Use Scraping Tools
If you don‘t want to mess with coding against the API yourself, there are tools that help streamline Google Maps scraping:
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ScraperAPI – Provides an interface to define and extract Maps data without any code.
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Octoparse – Browser extension that lets you scrape Maps results directly on google.com.
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ParseHub – Visual web scraping tool with a Google Maps template to simplify extraction.
These tools handle interfacing with Maps behind the scenes and provide an intuitive way to get listings data.
Browser Extensions
There are various browser extensions like Email Extractor that allow you to extract email addresses and other contact information directly from Google Maps and business websites.
While not as scalable as the API or scraping tools, browser extensions can be handy for quickly gathering contact data for individual businesses.
Scrape Business Websites to Enhance Listing Data
Once you‘ve extracted the base listings from Google Maps, it‘s time to visit each business website and gather additional contact details like:
- Email addresses
- Phone and fax numbers
- Social media profiles
- Contact/About page links
- Executives names & titles
There are a few approaches to scrape these details at scale:
General Purpose Web Scrapers
Tools like ScraperAPI allow you to build completely custom scrapers tailored to each site‘s structure.
With a little upfront configuration, you can locate and extract exactly the data points you need from any website. This hands-on approach provides the most flexibility.
Contact Information Scrapers
Services like Dux-Soup and PromptCloud are purpose-built to locate and scrape contact details from sites.
They use advanced heuristics to identify areas of pages likely to contain emails, social media links, phone numbers and other contact information. This can save time vs. building custom scrapers.
Email Finding Browser Extensions
Extensions like Email Hunter and VoilaNorbert allow you to easily extract email addresses directly from a website‘s page as you browse it manually.
These can be helpful for quickly grabbing emails for one-off outreach, but aren‘t as efficient for large datasets.
Leverage Existing Business Data Providers
Companies like ZoomInfo and LeadIQ provide access to huge databases of enriched business contact data they‘ve already scraped and compiled.
While not free, tapping into existing enhanced data can save you the hassle of doing large-scale extraction entirely yourself.
Merge Scraped Details with Google Maps Data
The last step is merging your scraped website contact data with the core listings originally pulled from Google Maps.
This results in a comprehensive dataset with both the breadth of listings from Maps and the depth of contact details obtained via scraping.
Your final merged data may look something like this:
| Name | Address | Phone | Website | Social | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joe‘s Coffee Shop | 123 Main St, NY | 212-555-1234 | https://www.joescoffee.com | [email protected] | Facebook: joescoffee Twitter: @joescoffee |
| Lucky Cafe | 456 Park Ave, NY | 212-555-5678 | https://www.luckycafe.com | [email protected] | Instagram: luckycafe |
To combine the data, you‘ll need to:
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Join by common fields – Match listings by name, address, phone etc.
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Resolve conflicts – Use most complete data when inconsistencies exist.
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Remove duplicates – Ensure no multiple entries for the same business.
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Format consistently – Standardize phone numbers, names etc.
Doing this well takes work but is crucial for creating clean, usable combined datasets.
Helpful Tools for Downloading, Viewing and Formatting Maps Data
Once you‘ve compiled your complete extracted Google Maps business listings, you likely want to download it from your scraping tool and view it in a spreadsheet or CSV format.
Here are some helpful tips for working with bulk Maps contact data:
Download Data from Your Scraping Platform
Most web scraping services allow you to download extracted data in multiple formats:
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Excel spreadsheets – Easy viewing and filtering of complex datasets.
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CSV files – Simple text-based format to access data.
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JSON – Common lightweight data interchange format.
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HTML – For integrating datasets into web apps and visualizations.
Choose the option that best fits your use case and downstream applications.
Export Directly from the Google Maps API
If you used the Maps API itself, you can also directly export results as a KML file – an XML-based geographic dataset format used by Google Earth and many GIS tools.
View Data in Online Database Tools
Rather than downloading listings, you can access them via cloud-based database platforms like:
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Airtable – Allows live previews and filtering of scraped datasets.
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MongoDB Atlas – Query and analyze listings via code in a fully managed database.
This allows interactive analysis without needing to export entire datasets.
Clean Data with OpenRefine
OpenRefine is an incredible free tool for data cleanup and transformation tasks like:
- Removing duplicates
- Standardizing formats
- Adding calculations/formulas
- Extending datasets via web APIs
Definitely worth checking out especially if you need to do significant data wrangling.
What Can You Do with Complete Google Maps Contact Data?
Now that you understand how to compile expanded business contact data by enhancing Google Maps with web scraping, what can you use it for?
Here are some of the most powerful applications:
Business Lead Generation
Build targeted mailing and call lists segmented by factors like location, industry, company size etc. Then reach out to promote your product or service.
Email Marketing
Run more personalized local email campaigns by scraping business-specific email addresses at scale.
Competitive Analysis
Benchmark competitors by scraping and analyzing their social media followers and engagement.
Business Directory Listings
Expand basic directory contact info with additional details like emails and executive names.
Local SEO Outreach
Offer SEO services to local businesses via direct personalized emails scraped from their sites.
Business Intelligence
Provide in-depth enriched Maps data as a service or internally for data-driven initiatives.
As you can see, the possibilities are almost endless by tapping into complete crowdsourced Maps data augmented via web scraping!
Let‘s Get Scraping!
There you have it – an actionable blueprint to leverage Google Maps‘ breadth and scalably enrich it with website scraping to access unrivaled business contact data.
With the right approach, you can build the targeted, comprehensive lead lists and marketing databases that simply aren‘t possible using Maps or individual sites alone.
I hope this guide gives you a valuable head start on tapping into this powerful combination of public web data. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions!
I‘m always happy to provide more personalized tips from my years of experience in the web scraping and contact data extraction space.
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