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How to clean a Google Maps lead list before cold outreach

A fresh export from a Google Maps search is raw material. It holds every business that matched the query, including some you should not contact and some you would contact twice. A few minutes of cleaning before the first message protects your sender reputation and your time. This article walks through five checks, in the order that saves the most work.

1. Check that each business fits your offer

Start with the category. Google assigns each business a primary category and may add more. A search for “plumber” can return a plumbing supply store, a water-damage restoration company, and a plumbing school next to the plumbers you wanted. Filter the category column to the types of business that buy what you sell, and remove the rest.

Next, use the rating and the review count as a rough read on the business. The right reading depends on the offer:

  • If you sell reputation or review management, a business with a low rating and a handful of reviews is a better fit than one with a high rating and hundreds of reviews.
  • If you sell web design, a business with many reviews and no website, or a website that is down or broken, is a better fit than one with a polished site.
  • If you sell to established companies, a high review count suggests a business with steady customers.

The website status column helps here. It tells you whether a site loaded normally, is missing, is parked, or failed with a certificate error, so you can pitch a site fix to a business whose site is broken and skip it when you sell something unrelated.

2. Remove duplicates by Google CID

The same business can appear in more than one search. A plumber in Denver may match both “plumber” and “emergency plumber”, and a business near a city boundary may match two neighbouring cities. Two rows can look different, with a different spelling or phone format, and still describe one business.

Every Google Maps business has a Google CID, a long string of digits that identifies the listing. Compare the CID column, not the name, to find true duplicates. Treat the CID as text. A spreadsheet program may round a number that long and turn two different listings into the same value, so import the column as text or work with it in a database or script. Within one search, Prospect Locally returns each business once. When you combine several searches, a bulk export removes duplicates by CID or Place ID for you.

3. Review the email and phone labels

Check each contact detail against its label before you load it into a tool.

  • Emails. Look at the role-based flag and the free-provider flag. Decide which kinds of address your campaign will use, and remove the rest. A first campaign to personal addresses on the business domain usually draws fewer complaints than one to a shared inbox.
  • Phone numbers. Each number carries a line type, mobile, landline, VoIP, or toll-free, and a carrier. Texting needs a mobile number, and a text to a landline goes nowhere. The With mobile quick filter keeps the businesses that have one.
  • The owner. A check mark beside the owner’s name means both the website and the Better Business Bureau profile named the same person. An unmarked name came from one source, so confirm it with a glance at the business’s about page before you use it in a greeting.

4. Honour opt-outs and suppression lists

Before you send, remove every contact who has asked not to hear from you. Keep a suppression list, a plain list of addresses and numbers that must never be contacted again, and compare every export against it. Include people who unsubscribed from earlier campaigns, anyone who replied with a request to stop, and numbers on do-not-call registries that apply where you operate.

Prospect Locally returns public business data. It does not decide whether you may contact a business. Laws such as CAN-SPAM in the United States and CASL in Canada set rules for commercial messages, and the sender is responsible for following the rules of the country where each recipient lives. Include a working opt-out in every message, and process each request promptly.

5. Choose the CSV format your tool expects

The Export menu offers five formats in two groups. Pick the one that matches the next tool in your workflow, because each tool expects different columns.

  • Simple is a short spreadsheet with the core business fields. It suits a quick read or a hand-built mail merge.
  • Advanced holds every field in the results table, plus extra emails, phones, and crawled pages, with the same column picker as the table. It suits analysis and custom imports.
  • GoHighLevel matches the columns that GoHighLevel’s contact import expects.
  • Instantly matches the columns that Instantly expects. It drops rows that have no email, because the tool cannot send to them, and it leaves the personalization column empty for you to fill.
  • OneClick Lead Gen carries the business name, phone, email, address, industry, brand colour, and logo address that OneClick’s lead generator imports.

Every export applies the filters you set on the results screen, so finish checks one through three first and export once. The documentation lists the columns of each format.

A short checklist

  1. Remove categories that do not buy your offer.
  2. Remove duplicates by Google CID.
  3. Keep the email and phone types your campaign can use.
  4. Remove everyone on your suppression list.
  5. Export in the format your outreach tool imports.

These checks take a few minutes and prevent the problems that cost the most later: a bounced message, a text to a landline, and a second email to someone who already said no.