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Empower Your Business with Google Maps Data in 2024

“Googling something” is almost synonymous to looking up information. Google has been the leading search engine over years and Google Maps, which is pre-installed in Android phones, is the top maps application downloaded in the US. You may think that digital maps are not relevant to your business, because the top examples you think of are the ones that are dependent on a map such as ride sharing or booking.

However, there is more value digital maps can provide your business only with the data they have about businesses. In this guide, we will explain how Google Maps data can help businesses find new customers, conduct market research or empower new business models. We will also compare the two ways to pull Google Maps data in an automated and efficient way.

Figure 1. Source: Statista

What is a Google Business Profile?

Let’s first explain how shops and services are displayed on Google Maps in the first place. Google allows businesses to register for a special account in which they list themselves as a business, provide contact details, get customer reviews, and be discovered by new customers.

According to Google, there has been a 500% increase in searches that include “near me” on Google for a wide variety of services between 2015-2017. For a B2C company, this makes Google Maps an important venue to have a presence in. For a B2B company, this makes Google Maps an important venue to look for businesses in a certain sector.

How can you collect Google Maps data automatically?

You can pull data from Google Maps either through their API or scraping Google Maps results.

  1. API: Google Maps provides API access to developers and businesses as a stable and granular data source. This is also the way to display Google Maps on your website or use the map itself in your business architecture. However there is a quota for the amount of data you can pull for free. If your business model directly uses the map technology or is entirely dependent on real time data, such as a traffic estimator, you may consider APIs as a more sustainable solution to partner with Google Maps.
  2. Web Scraping: As a robust way to collect data from websites, web scraping can also be used for pulling businesses with a certain keyword or in a certain area. Given that Google doesn’t provide technical documentation for this option as they do for APIs, you may need to develop technical capability in house or use an external web data collector. If you are not using the map technology itself and the search results or information on Google Maps is more important for you, then you may consider web scraping as a more sustainable solution to collect Google Maps data.

Sponsored:

Apify provides a Google Maps Scraper capable of extracting information from numerous Google Maps locations and businesses. This scraper’s API enables users to export the collected data, operate the scraper through an API, schedule and track executions, and connect with additional tools for enhanced functionality.

How can your business use Google Maps data?

  1. Finding new customers: If you are a B2B company working with especially local and small to mid-tier businesses, Google Maps can give you a rich base of potential customers to reach out to. With this comprehensive information of a business, such as their contact information, rating and website, you can have a readily available template to reach out to businesses. For example, let’s say you are looking for warehouses that may be interested in your inventory tracking solution and you would like to know whether there are any small warehouses in an area that you can target. First thing you will do is probably a Google Maps search and get below. Now, will you check each pin and call them one by one? What if you need to do it for all states in the US? Web scraping will enable you to get all the information you need listed on a spreadsheet which you can turn into a customer database, and update as frequently as you want.
  1. Connecting customers with businesses: Businesses look for opportunities to generate leads to their website. Google Maps data empowers user-friendly lists which enables consumers to filter or search for a service provider in a certain area. The most common example of this business model is Yellow Pages. This may also be an internal tool for you to revise your suppliers, such as an event organization company looking for caterers. Another way businesses use this data is to provide list of vendors and service providers as lists. See our data-driven maps for tech vendors and filter them by countries and cities.
  2. Enabling data-driven marketing: Data scraped from the web have many use cases in marketing. Scraping the Google Maps reviews about competitor providers can be a useful review framework for your business or an additional capability for you to provide your customers as a marketing service. For example, a retailer client have asked you to analyze the customer satisfaction of their physical stores. An organic and free source of customer opinions is Google Maps reviews. You can download all the ratings and reviews for all branches of your client, maybe also the competitor retailers, and apply a sentiment analysis based on text data to show whether there are differences across the stores in terms of customer satisfaction.

According to Google’s terms of service, use of their service is not illegal as long as the user’s conduct doesn’t “cause harm or liability to a user”. However, Google mentions “scraping content that doesn’t belong to you” under harmful uses. This seems

  • hypocritical of Google, a company whose business model is to scrape content that doesn’t belong to it and summarize it for its users
  • unlikely to be legally enforceable since companies like Linkedin so far failed to legally stop the scraping of their services.

However, web scraping is not desired by the websites that are being scraped given that it brings additional traffic to their platform and can exhaust their technical infrastructure. It is possible that Google may try to block web crawlers as much as they can and shut down their accounts.

To learn how to overcome potential challenges of web scraping, check out our in-depth guide on web scraping best practices.

To explore web scraping use cases for different industries, read our articles:

If you believe that your business may benefit from a web scraping solution, check our list of web crawlers to find the best vendor for you.

For guidance to choose the right tool, reach out to us:

Find the Right Vendors

This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Bengüsu Özcan.

Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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