Web Scraping Without Coding: Automating Google Maps Data Extraction

Web scraping is an essential skill for businesses that rely on lead generation and outreach. However, for those without coding experience, extracting data from websites can seem impossible. Fortunately, by combining two powerful tools – Apify for web scraping and n8n for automation – you can create a completely free system to extract valuable business information without writing a single line of code.

Getting Started with Apify

Apify is a platform that provides ready-made web scrapers (called “actors”) for hundreds of different websites. The platform offers $5 worth of free credits each month, which is typically enough to scrape around 1,000 results – saving you countless hours of manual data collection.

To begin, you’ll need to:

1. Sign up for a free Apify account
2. Navigate to the Apify store
3. Search for the website you want to scrape (in this case, Google Maps)

When choosing a web scraper, opt for the one with the most users, as these tend to be the most stable and reliable. For Google Maps, the “Google Maps Extractor” by Compass is an excellent choice.

Building an Automated Workflow with n8n

While Apify handles the web scraping, n8n allows you to automate the entire process. This means you can schedule regular scraping sessions and automatically process the results without manual intervention.

The basic workflow involves:

1. Setting up a scheduler trigger to run your scrape at regular intervals
2. Connecting n8n to Apify using HTTP requests
3. Configuring your search parameters
4. Processing and storing the results

Since n8n doesn’t have a native Apify integration, we use HTTP requests to connect the platforms. This involves copying the API endpoint from Apify and configuring it within n8n. You’ll need your Apify API key (found under Settings > API and Integrations) to authenticate the connection.

Advanced Data Extraction: Going Beyond Basic Contact Details

One limitation of Google Maps scraping is that listings typically don’t include email addresses, only phone numbers. To overcome this challenge, you can create a two-step scraping process:

1. First, scrape the business listings from Google Maps to get their websites
2. Then use another web scraper to visit each website and extract email addresses

This approach requires filtering out listings without websites and configuring a scraper to search through website pages for contact information. Setting the “maximum link depth” parameter allows the scraper to follow links from the homepage to find contact pages where email addresses are typically located.

Managing Resources and Avoiding Errors

When running web scrapers, it’s important to manage your resource usage to avoid hitting limits or unnecessarily burning through credits. Some key strategies include:

• Setting reasonable limits on the number of results to scrape
• Using loops to process websites one at a time rather than simultaneously
• Aggregating results to eliminate duplicates
• Starting with small test runs before scaling up

Memory usage is a common constraint with free accounts, so processing websites sequentially rather than in parallel can help avoid exceeding limits.

Storing and Using Your Data

Once you’ve extracted the data, you can automatically store it in Google Sheets or send it directly to other tools. For businesses focused on outreach, the scraped data can be fed directly into email marketing platforms like Instantly.ai or Lemlist to automate cold email campaigns.

When setting up the Google Sheets integration, ensure you map the appropriate fields from your scraper results to your spreadsheet columns. Common fields to include are:

• Business name
• Website URL
• City/location
• Industry/niche
• Email address
• Phone number

With this system in place, you can continuously gather fresh leads without the tedious manual work of copying and pasting contact information.

Conclusion

Web scraping doesn’t have to be complicated or require coding skills. By combining Apify’s ready-made scrapers with n8n’s automation capabilities, anyone can build a powerful system for extracting and processing data from websites like Google Maps. Start with small test runs to ensure everything is working correctly, then scale up by increasing your scraping limits and connecting to your preferred outreach tools.