Setting up your calendar

Updated August 24, 2026

An empty calendar does not show you an empty grid. It shows you four numbered stages with the description "Four steps, in order. Only one is ever waiting on you." Two of them are prerequisites, one is the build itself, and the last describes what happens afterwards.

The four stages

The panel is titled Build your first 30 days.

Read your site. This one is required. The plan is assembled from the topics your pages already cover, so Rankbank has to have read the site before it can plan around it. If the site has never been read, the stage carries a Read my site button that takes you to the site audit. Once a reading exists, the stage flips to done and says so: "Done, we know what your pages cover, so the plan can avoid repeating them and link to them."

Connect Search Console. Marked Optional, and it genuinely is. The stage says it plainly: "Without it the plan comes from your pages alone; with it, from what people actually search for." A Connect button takes you to the search performance page. It is worth doing before the build rather than after, because search data is what separates a plan built on measured demand from a plan built on what you happen to have published. Connecting Google Search Console covers the flow.

Build the 30-day plan. Locked until the site has been read, with the reason given rather than hidden: "Locked until your site has been read, there would be nothing to plan from." Once it is available the button reads Build my 30 days.

Articles get written, you approve. Not something you do, just the shape of what follows: "Each article is written on its scheduled day. You review it and send it to your CMS, nothing publishes on its own."

The empty content calendar showing a four-stage checklist, with the site-reading stage complete and the build stage active — The onboarding panel. Completed stages collapse to a done state, and only one stage at a time is ever waiting on you.

What the first build does

Pressing Build my 30 days starts a background job with four named steps, and the banner above the grid names each one as it happens.

Reading Search Console and your site. Rankbank pulls your recent Search Console queries with their impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, then walks the pages from your last site reading for titles, headings, descriptions and URL slugs. It also asks a model to suggest adjacent topics around clusters that already show measured demand.

Scoring the keywords it found. Every candidate gets an opportunity score out of 100 and a list of reasons. This is plain arithmetic on the measurements, which is why the Keywords page can show you the working.

Laying out your publishing days. The highest-scoring keywords are assigned to open publishing days, honouring the articles-per-week cadence from your settings and spreading days across the week rather than clumping them.

Finishing up. The last step writes the plan away and clears the run.

The banner shows the step name, a progress bar, a "Step N of 4" counter, and once keywords start arriving a line like "128 keywords found · 12 days planned". The first build is the slow one, and the banner says why: it "takes a few minutes because it reads your whole site and your Search Console history". You can leave the page. The banner polls while a run is active and reloads the page by itself when the run finishes, so coming back later shows the finished grid.

The calendar build in progress, showing the current step name, a progress bar and a step counter — The build banner. It names the step rather than showing a bare spinner, because the first run is long enough that a spinner would read as a hang.

Warning

If a build finishes without planning anything, Rankbank tells you rather than silently redisplaying the build panel. The message is "That build didn't find anything to plan", and it happens when there is neither Search Console data nor a reading of your site to work from. Run the site audit first, then build again.

What you see when it finishes

Four stat tiles sit above the grid.

Days planned counts the days that have an entry, with the hint "Target is 30". Ready to write counts the articles whose scheduled day has arrived and which have not been written yet, hinted "Waiting for you to write them". Drafts counts articles that have been written but not published: "Written, not yet published". Published counts what has been sent to a connected blog.

Below the tiles is the month grid itself, and below that a panel telling you how deep the pool is, along the lines of "84 more keywords are waiting in the pool. A new day is added automatically as each one comes into range, so the calendar stays about 30 days deep."

If Search Console is not connected, a panel above the grid says so directly: "This plan has no search data behind it." It offers a Connect Search Console link and asks you to refresh afterwards.

The content calendar after a successful build, with four stat tiles above a populated month grid — Days planned, ready to write, drafts and published, then the grid. The tiles change tone when a number wants your attention.

Refreshing the plan later

The Refresh keywords button sits at the top right of the calendar, next to Site audit, and appears once you have days planned. It runs a shorter job with two steps: "Re-reading Search Console" and "Filling any open days".

Use it when something has changed on the outside. You just connected Search Console and want the plan rebuilt around real queries. You published something that moved your rankings. A month has passed and the search data is meaningfully different. Refreshing re-mines keywords and fills any open days in the window; it does not throw away days you already have.

You do not need to press it to keep the calendar moving. A nightly top-up plans each newly-due day, mines more keywords if the pool has run dry, and writes what is due, a few articles at a time. The Refresh keywords button exists for when tomorrow is not soon enough.

Tip

If you would rather the calendar stopped extending itself, turn off Keep this calendar rolling in Style & settings. The calendar then simply runs out at the end of what is already planned, and the panel below the grid tells you automatic top-ups are switched off.

Where to go next

Where the keywords come from explains what the build found and why it ranked things the way it did.
Reading the calendar covers the grid, the cells and their buttons.
Connecting where it publishes is worth doing before your first draft is ready.

Still stuck?

Open Rankbank and the page this article describes — most screens explain themselves as you go.