How can I find new or small businesses?

LeadSwift was built with small business outreach in mind. While many platforms focus on enterprises, our tools are optimized to help you find and reach newer and smaller businesses as well—those more likely to respond and purchase your product or service.

Step 1: City-Level Searches

New and small businesses are less likely to rank in state-wide or national results. Instead, they tend to appear in more localized listings. We recommend searching by specific cities instead of entire states or countries.

City-level searches uncover far more local businesses, especially newer ones that don't yet have a strong online footprint.

Step 2: Filters

Some data points can help you spot smaller businesses, but they’re not all equally reliable. Here’s what to keep in mind:

  • Domain Registration: This is often the most reliable indicator of business age. Recently registered domains typically belong to newer, smaller businesses.
  • Google Rating: Newer businesses often have few or no reviews yet — a great signal when targeting early-stage companies.
  • Founded Date: This is pulled from LinkedIn. While useful, many smaller businesses may not have a LinkedIn presence at all. If this field exists, it may actually suggest a more established company.
  • # of Employees: Also sourced from LinkedIn. Accuracy can vary, especially for businesses with multiple locations or those listing a team size for one branch while being part of a larger organization.

You may use these fields together, but prioritize Domain Registration and Google Rating for the most reliable signals of size and recency.

Step 3: Weak Web Presence

New or budget-conscious businesses often have:

  • No website at all
  • Outdated or poorly built websites
  • Only social profiles (like Facebook or Google Maps) but no domain

You can visually scan these signals right in your leads table.

Step 4: Generic Business Emails

Most small businesses don’t have multiple staff members monitoring emails. That means reaching out to generic business emails - like "info@", "contact@", etc. - will be equally effective. These are likely to reach the actual decision maker for a smaller organization anyway.

As such, you should avoid filters like job-title:owner,founder, which will reduce reach to only those that have a LinkedIn profile.

Step 5: Re-Run Queries

New businesses appear every day. LeadSwift automatically tags newly discovered businesses with the status “New”. As such, you can routinely re-run the query to find new businesses. To identify the new ones quickly, just filter your search results by lead status “New”.

We also reprocess your saved searches when new businesses are discovered by another user performing the same search—at no extra cost. These leads are also marked as “New”

Conclusion

If you're selling to small businesses, LeadSwift gives you the precision you need. Focus on city-level searches, use size and recency signals like domain registration and Google reviews, avoid database contacts, and regularly re-run searches to stay on top of new opportunities.