Install and run the wizard

Install Townsmith – Local Pages Engine from the WordPress plugin directory and activate it. On first activation you land in a four-step wizard. It is skippable, and everything it does can be changed later in Settings.

1. Business profile. Name, phone, town. These feed the merge tokens and the LocalBusiness schema on every generated page.
2. Services. A service is something you sell — “Boiler Installation”, not “Plumbing News”. Each service gets its own hub and area pages.
3. Service areas. Paste one area per line. Fewer, genuinely covered areas beat a long thin list — the quality score will hold you to that.
4. Blueprint. Create the starter blueprint, then open it in the editor and make it yours.

Generate from the dashboard

Local Pages → Dashboard shows the matrix: your services across the top, areas down the side. Tick the empty cells you want, pick the blueprint, and press Generate. Pages are created as drafts — nothing ever auto-publishes — and each one is queued for a quality score the moment it exists. The queue runs in the background and resumes itself if you close the tab.

The free plugin generates for one service and five areas. That is not a trial — scoring, schema, linking and sync are all complete — it is the honest size for a single small business. Pro lifts the limits for agency work.

Make each page worth publishing

Open a draft and you will find ordinary blocks you can edit like any page, plus a local content slot: a named, deliberately empty space the score weighs heavily until a human fills it. Write what you genuinely know about the place — landmarks, street names, the jobs you do there. The pre-publish panel shows the score breakdown and lists exactly what to fix, with links that jump to the right block.

When a page clears the threshold (60 by default, yours to adjust in Settings), publish it. Below the threshold the free plugin warns before publishing; Pro can block outright. Track the whole set on Local Pages → Quality: every page’s score, its closest sibling, and a specific fix list.

Next: Blueprints and merge tokens — the one template every page is generated from.