How to import Google Maps search results into WordPress in 2023
This article is about leveraging the worlds most popular map service to kick-start your own map project.
Google Maps is by far the most used map service. Everybody knows it from their regular usage. It has become not just the market leader but more than that – a major part of our daily routines. Here is how to take advantage of that for your marketing strategy:
- What makes Google Maps outstanding?
- How can you make use of this?
- The Problem
- The Solution
- That is how we used it
What makes Google Maps outstanding?
It is not about the map style which is quiet good but there are better ones out there. It is not because of their almost perfect UX (user experience) interface. And it is not because it is just Google. It is because of its content layer that sits on top. Nowadays people don’t use Google Maps just to get the fastest route to a specific location – they search for it beforehand! And they don’t have to know the address nor the exact name of the place. It’s enough to type in something like “Sushi restaurants in Berlin” and Google will deliver a list with places. More than that every place comes with details like address, phone, website. And this is exactly what you need as a marketer!
How can you make use of this?
All you need to do is asking Google the right questions. Define your target group by a possible search term like “Ice cream manufacturers in UK” and Google will return you a list company names together with phone numbers, addresses and websites. These are your leads and it’s time to sell them your incredible cost efficient whipped cream machine asap. 🙂
The Problem 🙀
Yes, that is great news so far. Now you can sit down and start crawling Google Maps to put your lead list together. Just enter your target term then get the results then click on each result and then copy & paste name, address and other relevant data to your lead list. But wait – should you really have to do this completely by hand? Let’s assume that your conversion rate from lead to paying customer is around 0.5%. In this case you’ll have to craft a list of 2000 leads to end up with 10 successful sales. This will take you …. forever.
The Solution 🎉
Use automation! Just because Google does not offer to export a list of their search results it does not mean that this wouldn’t be possible. Not at all! I have launched a tool called WordPress Location Importer that’s capable of helping you out. Just enter your search term for Google Maps and within seconds you’ll get back a CSV file containing all the search results with the valuable data. And the best: IT’S FREE!
That is how I used it:
I’m developing plugins for WordPress. One of my releases is called Open User Map. This is a WordPress map plugin with many cool features like frontend location adding, multiple regions as tabs, marker clustering, notifications, beautiful map and marker styles.
To demo what the plugin is capable of I’ve created multiple use-cases like Best Surfspots Map and others. Therefor I had the need to put together lists of places that I could import to my plugin. So I developed the WordPress Location Importer to have a smart solution to this problem.
If you like to kick-start a map service like this yourself Open User Map and the WordPress Location Importer tool are the best choice.