Web Scraping for Lead Gen: A Practical Guide

Why Scrape for Leads?

Databases like Apollo and ZoomInfo are great, but they miss niche markets. Scraping lets you build custom lists from:

• Google Maps — Local businesses
• Industry directories — Niche B2B companies
• Job boards — Companies actively hiring (= growing)
• Review sites — G2, Capterra for SaaS competitors

Legal Considerations

Always respect robots.txt, rate limits, and personal data laws. Scraping public business data is generally fine; scraping personal data requires more care.

Tool Stack

Tool	Use Case
Playwright	JavaScript-heavy sites
Cheerio	Static HTML parsing
n8n	Orchestration & scheduling
Apify	Managed scraping infrastructure

Example: Scraping Google Maps

const results = await scrapeGoogleMaps({
  query: "marketing agencies in Austin TX",
  maxResults: 100,
  fields: ["name", "phone", "website", "rating"]
});

Data Cleaning Pipeline

Raw scraped data is messy. Always run it through:

1. Deduplication — Remove duplicate entries
2. Validation — Check URLs, phone formats
3. Enrichment — Add emails via Hunter.io
4. Scoring — Rate leads by fit

Putting It All Together

Use n8n to schedule daily scraping runs, pipe results through cleaning, and push verified leads directly to your CRM.