To find companies in a specific industry and city that match your ideal customer profile, define the profile that makes a company a fit — industry and sub-vertical, location, company size, revenue, funding stage, and growth signals — then filter a company source to those criteria and rank the results by how closely they match, not just by whether they carry the right industry label. Free routes (LinkedIn company filters, Google Maps and local directories, government business registries) get you a rough list in one city or industry, but they match on one field and hand back an unranked pile.
A company lookalike tool does it properly: it filters by location and reads the whole profile, so an industry-and-city list comes back ranked by fit. Below is the full method — what counts as a match beyond industry and city, the free routes and where they break, how to run it criteria-first, and how to go from a list of companies to decision-makers with verified emails you can actually send to.
How Do You Find Companies by Industry and Location That Match Your ICP?
You find them by turning "industry and location" into a full ideal customer profile and then ranking every match against it. Industry and city are the two filters everyone starts with, but on their own they are the weakest predictors of a sale. The job is to add the signals that actually separate a buyer from a lookalike-on-paper, then sort the list so the best-fit accounts rise to the top.
The criteria-first workflow in three moves
- 1. Define — write down the profile: industry and sub-vertical, location, size, revenue, funding, growth.
- 2. Filter & rank — narrow a company source to those criteria and order it by fit, not by label.
- 3. Activate — pull the decision-makers at each matched account, with verified emails, and start outreach.
The rest of this guide is doing each move well — and knowing why the free shortcuts stall at move two.
If you already have one account you win with, you can seed it and work from there — that is the seed-based lookalike approach. This guide is the other starting point: you have a target market in mind (an industry and a geography) but no single account to clone, so you build the list from criteria.
What Makes a Company a Good ICP Match Beyond Industry and City?
A company is a good ICP match when it shares the whole profile, not one or two fields. A 12-person shop and a 5,000-person enterprise can carry the same industry code and sit in the same city and buy nothing alike. These are the signals that actually sort an industry-and-location list:
Industry & sub-vertical
The entry filter, but read at the sub-vertical level ("fintech payments", not just "software"). A broad category code is where the false positives come from.
Location
City, region, or country — for territory coverage, local-presence rules, or timezone. A hard filter, but one that still needs ranking applied to what it returns.
Size & revenue
Headcount and revenue set the budget, the buying process, and the number of stakeholders. This is usually what decides whether an in-industry, in-city company is actually your buyer.
Funding & growth signals
Funding stage and growth signals — hiring, expansion, new markets — indicate both the budget to buy and the timing to care. A company scaling fast is a different prospect from a flat one next door.
The hard part is weighing these together. A plain filter treats every field as pass/fail; a lookalike engine reads the whole profile and scores overall closeness, so a company that fits your model and size ranks above a same-industry, same-city name-twin that is the wrong scale.
What Are the Free Ways to Filter Companies by Industry and Location?
There are three free routes worth knowing. Each gets you a rough list fast, and each has the same two limits — it matches on one or two fields, and it hands back an unranked pile.
LinkedIn company search filters
LinkedIn lets you filter companies by industry, headcount, and region. It is the most structured free route for white-collar and tech companies, but industries are self-selected single labels, the result count is capped, and there is no fit ranking — you still read each company by hand.
Google Maps & local directories
For local and SMB targets in a named city, a maps or directory search by category ("dental clinics in Austin") is fast and genuinely local. It is weak on size, revenue, and funding, and the data is listing-quality rather than firmographic.
Government registries & chambers of commerce
Business registries and chamber lists cover registered companies in a region and are authoritative on existence and location. They carry almost no commercial firmographics, so you learn a company is there, not whether it fits your ICP.
Where all three break
Every free route matches on a field or two — a label, a map pin, a registry entry — and hands you a pile with no fit order. You still have to read each company and decide how close it is, which is fine for ten accounts and unworkable for a few hundred. Ranking by overall fit, and filling in size, revenue and funding, is the piece none of them do.
How Does Company Lookalike Find Companies by Industry and Location?
Enrichley's Company Lookalike filters by location and reads the whole company profile, so an industry-and-city query comes back ranked by fit instead of dumped alphabetically. It searches live and ranks the market rather than returning a flat export, which is what the three signals below add on top of a plain filter.
Filter by location, size, revenue, and funding
Slide from a broad market view to a tight shortlist, and filter by size, revenue, funding, or location to dial in precision — so a single industry can produce a wide regional map or a narrow, high-fit list for one city.
Matches by meaning, then ranks by fit
It weighs business model, industry, size, revenue, funding, and growth signals and ranks matches by similarity, so a company that runs your exact model ranks high even if it sits under a slightly different industry label — and a same-industry name-twin of the wrong size ranks low.
Bring your own accounts
Work straight from the ranked results, or bring your own target accounts in by CSV or HubSpot import and enrich and score them in the same place — companies and people together in one workflow.
Turn an industry and a city into a ranked list
Company Lookalike filters by location and ranks the market by fit, so the companies most worth your time surface first — ready for prospecting, TAM sizing, and ABM list building.
Try Company LookalikeCriteria-First or Seed-Based: Which Should You Use?
Both approaches end in the same place — a ranked, filterable list of companies — and both feed the same People Search and Email Finder steps. The only difference is where you start, and that depends on what you have in hand.
| If you have... | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A target market (an industry and a geography) | Criteria-first (this guide) | You can define the profile up front; no example account is needed to begin. |
| One account you already win with | Seed-based lookalike | The seed carries signals you would struggle to write out by hand, so the match has more to work with. |
| A set of closed-won customers | Target account list workflow | Turn the common traits of your wins into ICP criteria, then screen the ranked matches. |
In practice the two meet in the middle: you can start criteria-first and then seed a representative company to sharpen the ranking, or start from a seed and tighten the location and size filters. If you have a customer you'd like ten more of, begin with how to find similar companies; if you already have closed-won accounts, the target account list workflow turns them into ICP criteria first.
How Do You Turn an Industry and Location List Into Prospects?
A list of companies is not a prospect list until it has people and verified emails. Once the industry-and-location list is ranked, two moves turn it into outreach you can send.
Pull the decision-makers
People Search runs live and filters by title, seniority, department, and company — so at every matched account you narrow to the exact buyers you need, each returned with a verified work email.
Verify before you send
Guessed addresses hard-bounce, and bounce rates above 2% flag you as a spammer. Enrichley returns only verified emails — 98% accuracy, catch-all included — so a new-market campaign lands instead of torching your domain reputation.
The payoff is that one industry-and-location list does several jobs: it is a prospect list for outreach, a count for TAM sizing in that market, and an ABM audience you push into ad and outreach campaigns — all from the same ranked, filterable source.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you find companies in a specific industry and location that match your ICP?
What makes a company a good ICP match beyond industry and city?
What are the free ways to filter companies by industry and location?
Can you find companies by industry and location without a seed company?
How is this different from finding similar (lookalike) companies?
How do you turn an industry and location list into a prospect list?
Build Your Industry and Location List
Filter Company Lookalike by industry and location, rank the market by fit, then pull the decision-makers and their verified emails with People Search — companies and people in one enriched workflow.