Finding local business leads on Google: how to build a B2B list the right way

Local B2B lists age fast. Businesses move, close or change numbers, and a list you bought last year may be badly out of date. Building your own from the Google Places API gives you fresher data and — importantly — a defensible legal basis, because you are using a documented public API under its terms rather than screen-scraping the map interface.

API vs browser scraping

Automated scraping of the Google Maps front end violates its terms of service and gets IP-blocked quickly. The Places API is the supported route: you supply a keyword and a location or radius and receive structured results with a place ID, name, category, formatted address, coordinates, phone number, website, rating, review count and opening hours. You pay per request against your own Google Cloud key, so cost and quota stay in your control.

What to collect — and what to leave

• Keep: business name, category, business address, business landline or listed mobile, website, rating, review volume, place ID.
• Keep: your own enrichment — the city, the search term that found them, the date you pulled the record.
• Leave: personal data of named individuals scraped from elsewhere and stitched onto the record without a lawful basis.
• Always: record the source and the date on every row, so a later erasure request is a one-click job.

From raw rows to a real pipeline

• De-duplicate on place ID first, then on normalised phone number, then on domain.
• Score before you contact: review count and rating are decent proxies for size and activity in most local categories.
• Split by category — a dental clinic and a logistics firm should never get the same opener.
• Push the top tier into a pipeline stage with an owner and a due date; keep the rest in a nurture list.
• Start on the channel the business actually publishes — a listed WhatsApp-enabled mobile beats a generic info@ address every time.

Clikgen's Google Places lead finder lets you search by keyword and area and save the businesses you want as leads. Duplicate detection in Leads helps you spot records you already have.