Google Maps business scraper with contact extraction via Apify and Firecrawl

Automated Lead Generation & Data Enrichment Pipeline Automation Overview This workflow automates the entire lifecycle of lead generation, from initial discovery on Google Maps to detailed contact information enrichment. It operates as a multi-stage pipeline that first identifies businesses based on a set query, scrapes their websites, extracts valuable contact details, and carefully organizes all the data into a central Google Sheet. The value of this automation is immense, transforming a highly manual, time-consuming research process into an autonomous, recurring task. It systematically builds a rich database of potential leads, complete with business details, emails, and social media profiles, freeing up valuable human hours for outreach and sales activities instead of data collection. Technologies Used - n8n: The central orchestrator that connects all services and manages the workflow logic. - Google Sheets: Functions as the primary database and control center, storing search queries, scraped business data, and enriched contact details. - Apify: A web scraping platform used to execute a large-scale search and data extraction from Google Maps. - Firecrawl: A specialized scraping API used to crawl the full content of individual business websites. - JavaScript (Code Node): Provides the custom logic for parsing website content and extracting specific contact information using regular expressions. Node-by-Node Analysis H3: Initialization & Google Maps Scraping - Schedule Trigger: This is the workflow's starting point. It is configured to run automatically every 30 minutes, ensuring a continuous and periodic search for new data. - Read Pending Queries: Connects to a Google Sheet and looks for rows in the "Query" sheet where the "Status" column is marked as false. This design allows users to add new scraping tasks to the sheet, which the workflow will automatically pick up. - Start Apify Scraping Job: This node initiates the first major data collection task. It sends an API request to Apify to start the "Google Places Crawler". It is configured to search for "restaurant" in "New York, USA" and retrieve up to 15 results.