Switch items on to build the page up. The score moves as you go, and the publish button stays locked until the page has earned it. There is no way past the gate, which is the only honest way to demonstrate a gate.
Below the threshold of 70. Townsmith refuses to publish it, which is the entire point of the plugin. This is the page that would otherwise get you a thin-content problem.
The real thing: townsmithwp.com ↗Because generating location pages became free, and the consequences did not. For years the reason nobody published three hundred town pages was that writing them took months. That constraint has gone. What has not gone is Google’s position on it: the spam policies name scaled content abuse specifically, and the wording turns on whether content was produced at scale to manipulate rankings rather than on which tool typed it.
So the risk moved from “this is too much work” to “this is now easy and still a bad idea”, which is a much harder thing to explain to somebody who has just been quoted forty pages by an agency. I got tired of explaining it. A gate that visibly refuses to publish the fortieth page makes the argument in about ten seconds and does not require anyone to take my word for anything.
Not word count. Every one of these can be present on a page of nine hundred words and absent from a page of three hundred.
The commonest failure and the easiest to detect. Take two of your location pages and count the runs of five consecutive words they share. If that overlap is high you have one page published many times, whatever the word count says.
A paragraph about how you have proudly served the beautiful town of Somewhere for many years is not local detail. Naming the industrial estate, the road people actually arrive on, or the trade that dominates the high street is.
The honest test is whether you can say something true about that place that you could not say about the next one along. If you cannot, the page has no reason to exist and adding four hundred words does not give it one.
Forty pages for forty towns you have never worked in is a claim about your business, not a description of it. A reader who rings you from the fortieth town finds out within a minute, which is the real cost.
Strip out the town name and read what is left. If it is a paragraph of platitudes about responsive design and passion for results, no scoring model was needed to tell you the answer.
Google's spam policies name scaled content abuse directly, and the wording is about intent and effect rather than about which tool produced the text. Writing three hundred pages by hand to game rankings is caught by the same rule as generating them.
The demo above is a simplified version of this, with the items reduced to switches so it can be understood at a glance. The real plugin scores continuously rather than in steps.
This site has five town pages and two county pages. Not thirty, and the number is deliberately awkward: there are towns within twenty minutes of me that do not have one, because I could not write anything about them that was both true and specific. Wadhurst and Rotherfield are named in passing on other pages and that is all they get.
You can check whether I am following my own rule. Open Crowborough and Eastbourne side by side and look for shared sentences. If you find the same paragraph on both, I have done the thing this page criticises and you should tell me, because that is a bug in the site and not a difference of opinion.
It does not read your website. There is no URL field, because a score generated from crawling one page of yours in half a second would be a guess dressed up as a measurement, and that is the genre of tool this one is trying not to be. It is a demonstration of a scoring model, using a page you assemble yourself.
It is also not the full plugin. Townsmith builds a whole matrix of pages from one blueprint, holds the per-page data, does the scoring continuously and blocks publication at the point of saving. What runs above is the gate logic on its own, which is the part worth understanding before you commit to a strategy.
Townsmith and the rest of what I have built and own outright is on work. The sector page for commercial contractors goes into how a service-area matrix should be structured when the pages do earn their place, which is a real situation and not a rhetorical one. If you want the broader picture of how location pages sit inside local search, that is on SEO and AI search visibility, and the other three tools are listed together.
As many as you can write something true and specific about, which for most small businesses is between one and about six. This site has five town pages and two county pages, and there are towns twenty minutes from me that do not have one because I could not write anything about them worth reading. The number is an output of that test, not a target you pick first.
No, and there is deliberately no URL field. A score produced by crawling one of your pages in half a second would be a guess wearing the costume of a measurement, which is precisely the genre of tool this one is trying not to be. It is a demonstration of a scoring model applied to a page you assemble yourself.
Not in itself, and this is the thing most commonly got wrong in both directions. Google's spam policies target scaled content abuse, and the wording turns on whether content was produced at scale primarily to manipulate rankings rather than on which tool typed it. Three hundred thin pages written by hand are caught by the same rule. One genuinely useful page drafted with help from a model is not.
Not in the real plugin and not here. Word count is trivially gamed, so it is not what is being counted. What is being counted is whether anything survives once the shared template is stripped out, and whether the page overlaps with its siblings. Padding makes both of those worse rather than better.
Yes, when they are real, and that is worth saying because the argument on this page is easily misread as never build them. A page about a town where you have done work, know the trade mix and can name the roads people arrive on is a good page. The problem is the fortieth one, not the first.
70 in this demonstration, because it is high enough to refuse a page assembled from generic parts and low enough that a genuinely decent page clears it. In the real plugin the threshold is configurable, which matters because a national contractor and a village plumber are not held to the same standard by anybody sensible.
The core is, on WordPress.org, and there is a paid Pro tier. I am the developer and I answer its support email, so treat this page as an advert with a working demonstration attached rather than as neutral advice. The demonstration is the part you can check.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.