How to Search for Better Leads: Pick the Right Trade, Town and Filter
LeadSweep searches Google’s business listings the way a customer would. So the words you type decide what comes back. One specific trade, one town, and the word a customer would use gets you a clean count and a scan full of businesses that need a website.
- One trade at a time: “barber”, not “beauty” or “all businesses”.
- One town or suburb: “Bowie, MD”, not “Maryland”.
- The customer’s word: what someone would type into Google Maps to find them.
- Count first: the free count tells you if the area is worth a scan.
1. Pick one specific trade
Google matches the words you type against business names and categories. A broad word like “Retail” only matches the few shops that use that word, and mixes everything else together. A specific trade matches exactly the businesses you want to pitch.
| Instead of | Try one of these |
|---|---|
| Retail | clothing store · shoe store · phone shop · furniture store |
| Food | restaurant · bakery · café · takeaway |
| Beauty | barber · hair salon · nail salon · beauty salon |
| Health | dentist · physiotherapist · optician · pharmacy |
| Home services | plumber · electrician · roofer · painter |
| Auto | car repair · tyre shop · car wash · auto body shop |
| Fitness | gym · yoga studio · personal trainer |
Words that cover everything, like “all”, “business”, “shop” or “services”, are refused, because a search for them returns a random handful rather than a market. If you want several trades in one town, run them one after another.
2. Use the word customers use
Type what someone looking for that business would type. “Car repair” finds more than “automotive service provider”. Outside English-speaking countries, the local word usually works best: “Tischler in Köln” finds carpenters in Cologne the way Germans search for them.
3. Search a town or suburb, not a state
- Whole countries and states can’t be scanned. Pick a city, town or suburb inside them instead. You aren’t charged when that happens.
- Smaller is more precise. “Santa Monica” returns a tighter list than “Los Angeles”.
- Big cities: go neighbourhood by neighbourhood. In a very busy area one scan covers the businesses nearest the centre, and the count tells you when that happens. Scanning the neighbourhoods one at a time covers the rest.
- Add the region when a name is shared: “Richmond, VA” rather than “Richmond”.
4. Pick trades that tend to have no website
Some trades are far more likely to have no website than others. In the US listings we checked, 45% of barbers and 36% of car repair shops had no website on Google, against about 6% of roofers. The full ranking is in the best niches for web design clients.
5. Count before you scan
The count is free. It tells you how many of that trade are in the town and, from a sample, roughly how many have no website. If it says “Most of these have a website”, either try a neighbouring trade or town, or go ahead and scan for the businesses whose site is broken, slow or insecure.
6. On a scan, turn on “Only businesses that need a website”
On Starter and Pro, this filter skips every business whose website works. You’re left with the ones with no site, or a dead, parked or broken one, and you aren’t charged for the leads it skips. A business already in your list is never charged again when a later scan finds it.
Try it
Check a trade and town now, free and without an account:
One kind of business, one town. No account needed.