How to Unearth Hidden Opportunities from Closed Businesses (And Why You Should Care)

Table des matières

Introduction: Are you Overlooking Closed Business Leads?

What if your biggest lead generation problem isn’t a lack of active businesses, but you’re completely ignoring valuable leads from closed businesses that everyone else overlooks?

You’re probably out there, just like everyone else, scrambling for the same “active” businesses, right? It is similar to a digital stampede, where all rush to the same hole, resulting in fierce competition and frustration.

Le Scraping Google Maps

Automate your Google Maps data collection. Export to CSV, Excel, or JSON in just a few minutes!

But what if I told you there’s a different way? A genuinely unconventional path to valuable data, hiding in plain sight, practically begging to be found?

We’re not talking about those obvious active businesses, we’re talking about the ones that have packed up, shut down, or closed businesses on Google Maps.

In this article we will be discussing the hidden value of closed business leads, the tools needed to scrape these leads, the step-by-step blueprint on how to utilize Outscraper, and the ethical and legal considerations of using web scrapers.

Scraping Closed Business
How to Scraped Closed Businesses

Why Bother with Closed Business? (The Hidden Value)

Some marketers and business owners may not bother to look at closed business leads, as they might think that these leads are useless, abandoned data points.

Wrong!

That mindset is exactly why your competitors are missing out on a possible rich source of leads. A “closed” sign isn’t just the end of business; it’s the start of a new story. Understanding why and how a business closed, and what assets it left behind, provides a unique lens into market dynamics that you simply won’t get from studying active or operational business entities.

The Powerful Hidden Values of Closed Businesses:

  1. Market Understanding: By tracking closures, you gain vital foresight to pinpoint struggling industries, identify areas with high customer loss, and spot or adapt to new market trends before your rivals do.
  2. Property & Real Estate Plays: Closed businesses on Google Maps serve as prime, early indicators of available commercial spaces, offering invaluable data for real estate professionals and location-scouting entrepreneurs.
  3. Indirect Competitor Insights: Observing a business’s closure indirectly reveals its former suppliers and displaced customers, presenting unique opportunities to step in and offer solutions where a void now exists.
  4. Cleanup & Accuracy: Systematically identifying and removing defunct businesses from your databases dramatically boosts outreach efficiency, improves data quality, and ensures your resources target only visible leads.
  5. Succession & Acquisition Opportunities: Occasionally a “closed” business represents a dormant asset ripe for revival or strategic acquisition, offering a unique chance to secure prime locations or existing infrastructure with less competition.

Le Scraping de courriels et de contacts

Find emails, contacts, and socials of companies that matter to you.

The Tools of the Trade in Identifying Closed Businesses

Now that we’ve established that untapped closed business leads are important. You’re still probably thinking that although valuable, how do I actually find these closed businesses without spending a year clicking around Google Maps like a madman?

That’s where the right tools come in. While the opportunity is clear, the real power lies in having the right gear to efficiently uncover these overlooked leads. Forget tedious manual searches, we’re talking about smart, automated solutions that will make your lead-generation efforts as easy as possible.

Here’s a breakdown of Tools:

  1. Google Maps (The Obvious One): While useful for confirming individual cases, directly identifying “permanently closed” or “temporarily closed” listings manually on Google Maps becomes unsustainable.
  2. The Scraper Solution: A data scraper specifically designed for Google Maps is your essential automation partner, efficiently extracting business details including their closure status across vast areas.
    • Why a good scraper is essential: These specialized tools are crucial for exploring dynamic website content and bypassing common anti-scraping measures like CAPTCHAs, and IP blocking, ensuring reliable data flow.
    • Key features to look for: Prioritize scrapers that offer high speed, guaranteed accuracy in data extraction, flexible export options (like CSV or Excel), and built-in filtering for “closed” statuses.
    • Pro Tip: For the most streamlined and coding-free experience, consider cloud-based Google Maps scraper services that handle all technical complexities, delivering pre-filtered “closed” business data directly to you.
  3. Data Cleaning & Analysis Tools: Once scraped, make use of spreadsheet software (Excel, Google Sheets), integrate with your CRM, ou utilize basic Python for advanced users, to clean, organize, and derive actionable insights from your raw data.

The Step-by-Step Blueprint: How to Use Scrape Close Business Using Google Maps Scraper

Step 1: Login with our Outscraper account or Sign-up for a free account if you don’t have an account yet. 

Outscraper's Login and Sign up

Step 2: Once inside the Outscraper’s dashboard click the Services Tab and Search for Google Maps Data Scraper. 

Outscraper Dashboard Search Tool
Outscraper's Services Search Tool
By Brand Selection of Google Maps Scraper

Le Scraping Google Maps

Automate your Google Maps data collection. Export to CSV, Excel, or JSON in just a few minutes!

Step 3: Input important parameters such as Business Categories, followed by specific location and the maximum results limit. If you want unlimited results just input “0” in the field. 

Closed Business Categories & Locations
Selecting Categories, Location, and Limits

Adding Enrichment and Closed Business Filters.

There are lots of enrichments available for Google Maps Scraper and you can select based on your use case.With regards to scraping closed business, simply add an Active Filter by selecting business_status, followed by equals and add either closed_permanently or closed_temporarily. You can also add the two filters together. 

Filtering Closed Business
Adding Enrichment and Active Filters for Closed Business

Step 4: Confirming the task and downloading the results in finding closed business using Google Maps Scraper. 

Confirm and download the task
Closed Business Leads
List of Temporarily and Permanently Closed Restaurants in California

Data Polishing and Activating Business Insights

After getting the importance of closed business leads, and scraping them. But here’s the brutal truth: a spreadsheet full of “closed businesses”, no matter how vast, is just… a spreadsheet. Raw data, sitting there, doing nothing. The real power isn’t in collecting the data; it’s in what you do with it and using it to transform those static numbers into a driving force for business growth.

Here’s how to activate those insights:

  1. The Real Estate Angle: Pass these early-identified vacant commercial property leads to hungry real estate agents, or proactively scout the properties yourself for investment or development.
  2. Market Trend Analysis: Transform closure map data into powerful heat maps to precisely pinpoint struggling industries, identify areas with high customer loss, or accurately forecast emerging market trends.
  3. Competitor Strategy: Analyze why specific competitors might have closed their doors, or gather invaluable lessons about their pitfalls, market receptiveness, or shifts in consumer demand.
  4. Supplier/Vendor Outreach: Proactively identify and engage with the former suppliers or vendors of closed businesses, as they are likely seeking new partners and revenue streams.
  5. Targeted Marketing Campaigns: With extreme care and genuine value, identify customers of similar closed businesses and offer your alternative solutions, focusing purely on solving their now-displaced need rather than a hard sell.   

Grattoir de résultats de recherche Google

Grattez les résultats de recherche de Google. Il faut seulement 6 minutes pour vous inscrire et commencer à extraire.

Pro-Level Moves and Troubleshooting Tips

Alright, so you’ve grasped the hidden value of closed businesses, and you’ve got your tools lined up. But raw data extraction, especially from a platform as robust as Google Maps, is challenging.

These challenges from getting blocked by Google to ensuring pinpoint accuracy are some of the reasons why most business owners give up. But there’s a solution for that, Outscraper's Le Scraping Google Maps will effectively solve many of the common problems before you even encounter them. Still understanding these challenges empowers you to choose the right tools and strategies.

Here’s a breakdown of Troubleshooting Tips:

  • Dealing with CAPTCHAs and Blocks: Without a specialized tool, you’d need to manually manage IP rotation, user-agent changes, and randomized delays to avoid detection and frustrating CAPTCHA walls.
  • Refining Your Queries: To ensure you’re getting precisely the data you need, you must get familiar with crafting hyper-specific keywords and highly granular geographic filters in your searches.
  • Automating the Process: For advanced users, you are craving ultimate control beyond no-code options, scripting languages like Python or JavaScript allow you to build custom, highly scalable scraping solutions.
  • Validating “Closed” Status: Always double-check a business’s “permanently closed” status by cross-referencing information across other mapping services, official government registries, social media profiles, and defunct websites.

While these troubleshooting strategies are critical for anyone building their own scraping solution, a robust platform like Outscraper is specifically engineered to handle all these complexities for you. It manages proxies, bypasses CAPTCHA’s, offers precise filtering, and delivers validated data directly, transforming a coding nightmare into a few simple clicks.

Conclusion: Your Unfair Advantage in a Crowded Market

Look, you’ve seen the struggle. Every marketer and business owner out there is frantically fighting for the same “active” leads, ending up in same cutthroat competition and it’s exhausting.

But you? You now have a different path. We’ve pulled back the curtain on lead generation strategy that most of your rivals are completely blind-the overlooked closed businesses data. This isn’t about scraping for the sake of it; it’s about transforming seemingly “useless” data into market intelligence, real estate opportunities, and insights that give you an almost unfair advantage.

We walked through why these leads matter, how to unearth them with powerful tools like Outscraper’s Le Scraping Google Maps, and exactly what to do with the data to achieve business growth.

The bottom line is clear, the competition for “active” leads will only intensify, but by mastering the art of uncovering unusual leads from Google Maps, you’re not just finding leads, you’re uncovering market secrets.

Pay as you go without monthly subscription fees. 50 free searches per month. Sign up and try it for free now.

FAQ

Questions et réponses les plus fréquentes

Le Scraping, la récolte ou l'extraction de Google Map est un processus d'obtention de toutes les informations sur les lieux (nom, adresse, coordonnées, site, téléphone, heures d'ouverture, etc.) à partir du site Google Maps. Il automatise l'exportation manuelle des données.

  1. Login to Google Maps scraper.
  2. Sélectionnez les catégories que vous souhaitez extraire.
  3. Sélectionnez des emplacements dans la liste déroulante.
  4. Sélectionnez la langue et vérifiez les autres paramètres avancés.
  5. Cliquez sur « Extraire des données ».

Les données de Google Maps peuvent être utilisées dans de nombreux domaines. Le cas le plus courant est la prospection de nouveaux clients pour votre entreprise ou l'utilisation des données pour l'IA et le machine learning. Les données de Google Places peuvent également être une source pour la création de votre application.

Oui. Vous pouvez utiliser Emails & Contacts Scraper avec Google Maps scraper pour enrichir les données de Google. Pour ce faire, sélectionnez "Emails & Contacts Scraper" dans la section "Enrichir par d'autres services" sur la page Google Maps Scraper.

No. All scraping activities occur on Outscraper servers, ensuring that your IP address is not utilized for data scraping. You can close your computer an the scraping task will still be running.

An API is a tool that lets you access Google Maps data automatically. With a scraper API, you can quickly gather the information you need.


Ed Umbao

As Head of Content and SEO Strategist at Outscraper, Ed Umbao specializes in making complex technical topics, including web scraping, clear, discoverable, and genuinely helpful for users. With a decade-plus of experience, from co-founding a news website (2011) to optimizing for a Web3 startup (2023), he is passionate about connecting innovative data solutions with the right audience. Linkedin Twitter/X