How to Find Business Contacts by Industry (The Google Maps Method)

If you sell to a specific vertical — say you build websites for dentists, supply equipment to restaurants, or offer bookkeeping to law firms — generic lead lists are useless to you. You don't need any business; you need every business in one industry, in the areas you serve. This guide explains how to find business contacts by industry at scale, using the most complete industry-tagged database of local businesses in the world: Google Maps.

Why Industry Targeting Matters

A list of 10,000 random businesses converts worse than a list of 200 businesses that all share the exact problem your product solves. When every contact on your list belongs to the same industry, three things improve at once:

• Your messaging gets sharper. One industry means one set of pain points, one vocabulary, one objection to handle. You can write a single outreach sequence that lands every time instead of watering it down to fit everyone.
• Your qualification is built in. If your tool only sells to medical clinics, a list of medical clinics needs no filtering. The targeting is the qualification.
• Your hit rate goes up. Relevance drives reply rates. A dentist hearing about software built for dental practices pays attention in a way they never would for a generic pitch.

The hard part has always been building that list. That's where Google Maps comes in.

Google Maps Is Organized by Industry Already

Most people think of Google Maps as a map. For lead generation it's something far more useful: a database where every single business is already tagged with an industry category.

When a business creates a listing, Google requires it to pick a primary category — "Dental clinic", "Italian restaurant", "Real estate agency", "Law firm", "Plumber" — from a taxonomy of more than 4,000 categories. That category is structured data attached to the listing, right alongside the name, phone number, address, website, rating, and review count.

In other words, the industry segmentation you'd normally pay a data broker for has already been done, by the businesses themselves, and it's kept current because listings that go stale lose customers. You just need a way to pull it out.

How to Find Contacts in a Specific Industry

Here is the practical workflow for building an industry-specific contact list from Google Maps.

Step 1 — Pin Down the Exact Category

Start with the precise term a business in your target industry would use to describe itself. "Restaurants" is broad; "sushi restaurant", "pizza restaurant", or "vegan restaurant" are sharper. The closer your search term matches the category businesses actually pick, the cleaner your results.

If your market spans several related categories — say "dentist", "orthodontist", and "dental clinic" — treat each as its own search and merge the results afterward. This captures the full industry without diluting any single query.

Step 2 — Define Your Geography

An industry plus a location is what turns a category into a usable list. Decide how wide you need to go: a single city for a local service business, a metro region for a regional play, or an entire country if you operate nationally. Running the same category across several cities and stacking the results is the standard way to cover a large territory.

Step 3 — Extract the Data

Manually clicking through every "marketing agency in Chicago" listing and copying the details would take days. A business data extraction tool does it in minutes. You specify the category and area, set how many records you want, and the tool returns structured data for every matching listing:

• Business name
• Phone number
• Full address
• Website URL
• Google rating and review count
• Business category

With BasedOnBusiness, this is a no-code search — type the category and location, set your volume, and run it. If you're building an automated pipeline, the REST API (/api/v1/scrapes) returns the same data as JSON, and a scrape.done webhook tells your system the moment a job finishes.

Step 4 — Use Category and Rating to Refine

This is where industry data gets powerful. Because every record carries its category, rating, and review count, you can slice the list further:

• Filter to businesses that match your exact sub-category and drop the near-misses
• Prioritize by rating if you sell premium services (or target low-rated listings if you sell reputation or review management)
• Sort by review count to separate established players from brand-new listings

The result is a list that isn't just "businesses in an industry" but "the right businesses in an industry."

A Realistic Note on Email

One honest caveat: Google Maps listings do not include email addresses. Phone numbers, addresses, and websites are public at the listing level; emails are not. Any tool claiming to extract emails directly from Google Maps is overstating what's possible.

For most industry outreach this is fine — you'll have direct phone numbers and websites, which are often better entry points than a generic info@ inbox anyway. If you specifically need emails, take the website URLs from your list and run them through a separate email-finding step.

Common Industries This Works For

This approach works for essentially any local or semi-local industry. The verticals where it pays off most:

• Agencies selling to restaurants, dentists, gyms, salons, or any local vertical
• B2B SaaS targeting a specific business type — clinics, law firms, auto shops
• Suppliers and wholesalers building distributor and retailer lists by category
• Recruiters mapping every employer of a given type in a region
• Franchise and real estate scouts sizing the density of a category in a market

Get Started Free

If you want to build your first industry-targeted list without committing to a paid plan, BasedOnBusiness gives you 50 free credits when you sign up — no credit card required. Pick a category, pick a city, and download a real, structured list in minutes. Visit basedonb.com to get started.