Latitude, longitude and geocoding The coordinates behind every Google Maps lead

What latitude, longitude and geocoding mean

Latitude is the angle, measured in degrees, that tells you how far north or south a point sits from the Equator, ranging from -90 at the South Pole to 90 at the North Pole. Longitude is the angle that tells you how far east or west a point sits from the Prime Meridian, ranging from -180 to 180. Geocoding is the act of converting a text address into that latitude and longitude pair so software can place it on a map.

A single coordinate pair looks like 40.4168, -3.7038. That is the center of Madrid. The first number is latitude, the second is longitude, and the order is always latitude first in Google Maps data. Written this way, any place on the planet reduces to two numbers that never point at two different spots.

The reference frame that these numbers assume matters. Google Maps, GPS receivers, and almost every consumer mapping system express coordinates in the WGS84 datum. When you export a business from a Google Maps scrape, the latitude and longitude you receive are already in this standard, so they drop straight onto any modern map without conversion.

The core terms in one table

These are the words you will meet whenever location data shows up in a Google Maps export. Keep this table close when you open a fresh CSV.

Notice that geocoding and reverse geocoding are mirror images. Both are defined in the official Google Geocoding API documentation, which sales tools lean on behind the scenes to keep addresses and coordinates in sync.

How many decimals do you actually need

The number of decimal places in a coordinate decides how tightly it points. More digits mean a smaller circle of uncertainty. For finding a storefront, five or six decimals is plenty.

Google Maps typically returns six decimal places. That is far more than a field rep needs to park outside the right door, but the extra precision costs nothing and keeps your data honest. If you also collect a Plus Code, you get a short human friendly reference that maps back to the same spot.

Where coordinates show up in a scrape

When you scrape a Google Maps result, latitude and longitude arrive as two of the standard columns, sitting alongside the name, phone, category, and rating. You can see the full picture in our guide to Google Maps data fields, but the coordinate pair is the one that unlocks everything visual.

Reverse geocoding runs the other way. If you only have a coordinate, a lookup against Google's reverse geocoding endpoint rebuilds the street, city, and postal code. This is how a captured pin becomes a mailing address you can put in an email or a proposal.

Most scraping tools stop after handing you these numbers in a spreadsheet. That is useful, but a column of coordinates is not a map. To turn 40.4168, -3.7038 into something a salesperson can drive, the data has to move into a system that reads coordinates natively.

Coordinates are what make a mapped CRM work

The extension is the means. The point is what the Vonsel dashboard does with the numbers. Because every lead carries a real coordinate pair, the mapped CRM plots your whole list on an interactive map the moment it lands, instead of leaving you to squint at a spreadsheet.

From there, coordinates power the parts of prospecting that addresses alone cannot. You can draw territories by neighborhood, group leads by drive time, and let the Sales Intelligence layer build an optimized route so a field rep visits more businesses in a day. The same pins feed AI email per business and the value added, context rich databases that sit at the heart of the platform. See the full picture on the features page.

This is also why coordinate quality beats raw volume. A clean, correctly geocoded list you built yourself outperforms a bulk file of stale rows, a point we make in Google Maps data vs bought lists. When you scrape your own leads, you know exactly where each pin came from and when.

Collect map ready leads yourself

You do not need to write geocoding code or juggle an API key to get clean coordinates. The Vonsel Chrome extension captures latitude and longitude with each Google Maps result and sends them straight into the dashboard, where they become pins you can act on. If addresses are your priority, our walkthrough on extracting addresses from Google Maps shows the same flow.

Understanding the vocabulary also keeps you on the right side of the rules. Coordinates for a business are commercial location data, which is very different from personal data, a distinction worth reading up on in is it legal to scrape Google Maps. Once the concepts click, two numbers stop looking like noise and start looking like a map of your next quarter.