How Google Maps can give businesses vital intelligence about their competitors
Businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to grow their company - but there’s one tool that’s often ignored, which can help them get ahead and keep track of the competition.
Google Maps, though on the surface it may not seem like it, is a treasure trove of data.
The tool holds loads of information on every location - including a restaurant, hairdresser, or even a bus stop - and informs you when they’re busy, what customers think of them, and what services they offer.
And all of it is just sitting there, ready for you to use.
Back in the day, you’d have to rely on gossip or sneak around town to see what your competitors were up to.
Now? You can gather it all from your phone or laptop.
However, to truly gain an edge, you need a substantial amount of data from hundreds of businesses.
That’s where a tool called a web scraper comes in.
This small program goes over a website for you and retrieves the information you want - without having to trawl through hundreds of locations yourself.
But a program like this needs some know-how to put together - and thankfully, there are online platforms that host crawlers (also scrapers) made by others that you can use for a small fee.
One of which is Apify.
This hosts over 5,000 of these programs, which the company calls Actors, in its store.
One of these Actors is the Google Maps Scraper, which, as the name suggests, will scrape Google Maps for you and get the information you need.
The nice thing about using Apify for this is that it’s designed with users in mind, users who may not always know their way around programs like this.
Instead of having to figure out how it works, Apify offers a simple interface with some tutorials to get you started.
It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to get the data you need - and with all this info, you can spot bigger gaps in the market across an entire region and adjust accordingly.
More importantly, you can scrape reviews of competitors and see which words pop up the most.
If most others are lacking a specific service that gets requested, you can choose to provide it.
If everybody else offers something you don’t, you can start doing that instead.
The only limit is what you can think of; the data is at your fingertips. Try out Google Maps Scraper today; Apify’s free plan gives you up to $5 of free usage, which lets you scrape hundreds of businesses.