Capture & Score Local Leads: Serper + Hunter.io + Sheets

Capture, enrich, and score local leads automatically with Serper + Hunter.io + Google Sheets

This n8n workflow finds local businesses in Google Places, extracts contact emails from each website (and enriches via Hunter.io when needed), then scores every lead and appends it to Google Sheets—with an optional HMAC-signed webhook sync back to your CRM.

What this workflow does

• Starts manually or via webhook: You can run it on demand, or trigger it with an optional webhook request that passes a run ID and a maximum number of leads to capture.
• Searches Google Places by area using Serper.dev: It builds area-based Google Places queries, calls Serper.dev, then filters results using your name rules and deduplicates overlapping matches.
• Avoids reprocessing: It caps the leads to your requested maximum and removes businesses whose Place ID already exists in your Google Sheets.
• Extracts emails from each business website: For each remaining lead, it fetches the homepage and contact page and extracts a contact email restricted to the business’s own domain.
• Enriches with Hunter.io if no email is found: When extraction fails, it uses Hunter.io domain search to find an email and records contact name and position when available.
• Scores and tiers leads: It scores based on available details (email/phone/website/named contact) and assigns a Hot/Warm/Cold tier.
• Saves to Google Sheets + optional CRM sync: Appends results to Google Sheets and can batch qualified leads to your CRM using an HMAC-SHA256 signature.

Use cases

• Local SEO and outbound teams generating fresh lead lists by city/region.
• SaaS operators keeping CRM data current without manual research.
• Automation engineers building a repeatable lead capture pipeline using n8n.

Technical details

• Integrations/nodes: Serper.dev, Hunter.io, Webhook, HTTP Request, Code, Crypto (HMAC-SHA256), Google Sheets.
• Setup highlights: Configure Serper credentials as HTTP Header Auth with header name X-API-KEY, and Hunter.io as HTTP Query Auth with parameter api_key.
• Output: Lead rows appended to Google Sheets; optional signed webhook batching to your CRM.