I recently helped a friend who runs a small web design studio build a list of local businesses to contact. The goal was simple: every bakery and cafe in two neighbourhoods, with phone, website and rating, in a spreadsheet.
What I tried first
Copying from Google Maps by hand. It works for ten places and falls apart at fifty.
What worked
- One search per niche and area, e.g.
bakery Brooklyn Heights. - Export the public listing data with a browser extension. I used GMB Scraper, which saves Google Business Profile fields (name, phone, website, hours, rating) to CSV or XLSX. Its free plan covered this small run.
- In the spreadsheet: remove duplicates, flag places with no website (those were the best leads for a design studio), and sort by review count.
Takeaways
- Small, focused searches give cleaner data than one big one.
- The 'no website' filter was the most useful column for this use case.
- Keep it to public business info and be polite in outreach.
Happy to hear how others structure local lead lists.
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