Why Google Maps is a lead goldmine

If you run a local lead gen agency, SMMA or B2B service targeting brick‑and‑mortar businesses, the biggest bottleneck is usually reliable, affordable data. Paying for tools like big B2B databases just to get basic company info and emails can burn your margins before you even send a single cold email.

Google Maps solves this. Every serious local business wants to show up there, so it already has their name, website, phone, reviews and address. When you combine that data with a free automation platform like n8n and a search API like Serper.dev, you can turn Google Maps into a 24/7 lead‑scraping engine that feeds your outbound pipeline on autopilot.

The stack: what you need to run the system

This workflow uses only free or nearly‑free tools that are accessible even if you are just starting your agency. The point is to get the same leverage as expensive databases without recurring SaaS bills.

You need four components:

• A Google Sheet template to store inputs (cities + niche) and outputs (scraped leads).

• Serper.dev for Google Maps search via API, with a generous free query allowance on a new account.

• n8n as the automation engine that reads the sheet, calls Serper.dev and writes leads back.

• An Apify email/contact scraper to turn scraped websites into email addresses and phone numbers.

Once this stack is wired together, you can generate thousands of targeted local leads in minutes and then feed them into your cold email system.

Step 1: Build your geographic and niche input

First you define where and who you want to target. The Google Sheet has a tab with US states and their most popular cities, plus an “Inputs” tab where you paste your selected locations and niche.

The workflow:

1. Go to the United States tab, filter by a specific state (for example, Georgia), and select only that state.

2. Copy all the visible cities for that state and paste them into the Inputs tab.

3. In the niche column, write the type of business you want—remodeling company, med spa, dentist, roofing contractor, etc.—and drag it down for all rows.

4. Leave the highlighted blue column untouched; the scraper will handle it.

You end up with rows like:

• City: Atlanta – Niche: remodeling company

• City: Savannah – Niche: remodeling company

• City: Augusta – Niche: remodeling company

The n8n workflow turns each row into a Google Maps query and then scrapes the businesses that match your niche in that city.

Step 2: Get your Serper.dev API key and plug it into n8n

To hit Google Maps programmatically, you use Serper.dev. Creating an account takes a minute and gives you enough free queries to generate hundreds of locations’ worth of data.

Process:

1. Sign up at Serper.dev and confirm your email.

2. Go to the API Keys section and copy your key.

3. Open the n8n template workflow and locate each Serper “places” node.

4. In each node, find the x‑api‑key field and paste your API key into the value field.

You repeat this for all the “page” nodes so every pagination step uses your key. After that you rarely need the Serper dashboard again unless you upgrade credits or create additional accounts.

Step 3: Connect the Google Sheet to n8n and launch scraping

Now you wire up your sheet and let n8n do the heavy lifting. The template is pre‑built to read from “Inputs” and write to “Output,” so your job is to point it at your file and tabs.

In n8n:

1. On the Get Rows (Sheet) node, choose your Google Sheet file, then choose the Inputs tab.

2. On the final Google Sheets node, select the same file and pick the Output tab.

3. Save the workflow.

4. Click Execute Workflow.

As it runs, you will see about 50 items per page node flowing through (for example, 50 results per Google Maps “page”). A filter step discards bad leads such as unusable websites, and your Output tab fills up with company names, websites, phone numbers and more in seconds.

In the Georgia remodeling example from the video, scraping just that one state produced around 2,000 raw leads in a single run. After cleaning duplicates, about 1,400 unique leads remained, enough for a serious cold email push.

Step 4: Clean duplicates and prep a usable list

Google Maps scrapers often return duplicate entries when businesses show up in multiple searches, so cleaning is mandatory. The sheet template uses red formatting to highlight duplicates so you can remove them quickly.

To clean:

1. After scraping, go to your Output tab and scroll to the website (or other key) column.

2. Select the entire column and add a filter.

3. Use Filter by color and choose the red fill to show only duplicates.

4. Select all visible red rows and delete those rows.

You are left with a set of unique leads: business name, website, phone, address and more, ready for enrichment. In the example, that meant 1,400 contactable businesses from just one niche and one state.

Step 5: Turn websites into emails with Apify

For cold email, URLs alone are not enough—you need real email addresses. That is where an Apify actor that extracts email, phone and social media from websites comes into play.

Workflow:

1. Copy the entire website column from your Output sheet.

2. Open the Apify actor for extracting contact info, choose bulk edit and paste all the URLs.

3. Start the actor and let it crawl each website.

It will attempt to pull:

• Email addresses

• Phone numbers

• Social media links

Typically it finds emails for a substantial share of the websites, often somewhere around half depending on niche and how well the sites are built. Once you export these results, you merge them back into your Google Sheet, validate the emails, and you now have a fully usable cold email list: company, niche, location, website, email, phone.

From scraped data to live campaigns

A scraper is only valuable if the data ends up in real campaigns. The endgame here is to plug your cleaned list straight into your outbound engine. For most agencies running this setup, that means a cold email platform, combined with a sharp offer tailored to the exact niche scraped.

The path:

1. Validate emails with an email verification tool.

2. Import into your cold email sending platform.

3. Segment by niche/state and write niche‑specific angles for your cold emails.

4. Turn on sequences and monitor replies and booked calls.

Because your list is both geographically and niche‑targeted, your copy can be extremely specific, referencing local context, regulations or niche‑specific pain points. That is how you turn scraped data into a high‑intent, high‑conversion pipeline instead of just a big spreadsheet.

Why this beats buying databases when you scale

The power of this workflow is not only that it is free; it is that it is owned and infinitely repeatable. You are not renting generic B2B data from a provider—you are building a proprietary lead engine for your exact niches and geographies.

Key advantages:

• Hyper‑targeting: you can decide “only med spas in Texas,” “only roofers in Florida,” or “only dentists in Ontario” and have fresh leads within minutes.

• Cost control: beyond modest API or hosting costs when you scale, there are no heavy subscriptions; you can keep your client acquisition lean.

• Scalability: as long as your credits and infrastructure can handle it, you can expand to more states, more niches or entire countries.

Once set up, generating a new batch of 1,000–2,000 leads for a fresh micro‑niche is just changing a niche keyword, copying more cities and re‑running the workflow. That kind of leverage lets agency owners send tens of thousands of cold emails a day for themselves and their clients without ever relying on expensive databases or one‑off lead providers.