Creating your Rankbank account

Signing up takes three screens, and two of them are questions rather than form fields. Rankbank asks who you are and what you came for before it asks for an email, because those two answers decide where it drops you afterwards. Neither answer locks anything, and both are editable later.

The three steps

The register page at /register shows a three-segment progress bar and one question per screen:

1. What best describes you? with the sub-line "There's no wrong answer — it only sets up your first screen."
2. What would you like to do? with "Pick anything that sounds useful. You can try the rest later."
3. Create your account with "Free to join — just an email and a password."

Continue stays disabled until you have answered the screen you are on, and Back takes you to the previous one without losing what you picked.

Step one: what best describes you?

Three cards, and you pick exactly one. Selecting a card expands a second line explaining what that choice means here.

I write articles is described as "You write posts that get published on other people's websites." Once selected it adds: "Here that's called a guest author. You'll bring in a draft, we help polish it, and it goes out for review — usually to earn a link back to you or your client."

I run a website reads "You own or manage a site and want more visitors from Google," and expands to "You'll get a workspace for your site: publish articles to it, swap links with related sites, and get a plain-English list of what to fix."

Both reads "You write for others and run a site of your own," and expands to "You get the writing tools and the site tools, and can switch between the two views any time."

This is the one answer with a structural consequence. Picking I run a website or Both creates a workspace for you as part of signing up, so the site-owner screens are ready when you get to them. Picking I write articles creates an account with no workspace, which is exactly right if you write for other people's sites and have no site of your own to manage.

Step two: what would you like to do?

The second screen is a multi-select, and the options are filtered by your first answer. Writers see the two that apply to them. Site owners and "both" accounts see all six.

• Guest posts: "Write for other sites — or accept articles onto yours."
• Link swaps: "You link to a related site, they link back. Both sites look more trusted to Google."
• Site check-up: "We read your site and list what's broken and what to fix first."
• Auto blog posts: "A rolling calendar of articles planned and written for your site."
• Rank better in search: "Suggestions to improve how your pages show up on Google and AI search."
• Paid collaborations: "Sponsored placements between sites, with the terms tracked here."

Unless you picked I run a website, the Guest posts card carries a Most popular badge. That is a hint about what most new accounts choose, not a recommendation about your situation.

Pick at least one to continue, and pick as many as you like. If you go Back and change your first answer, any interests that no longer apply are quietly dropped.

What your interests actually do

They are preference data. They are stored against your profile, they can be changed at any time, and they grant and remove nothing. Every module you can reach with these answers, you can reach with any other set of them.

You will find them again on your Profile page under About you, where the field is labelled "What are you interested in?" and described as "What we put first in your sidebar and dashboard." The card itself says the honest version: "Change these anytime — nothing breaks, the product just re-arranges around what you care about."

One thing worth knowing, because the wording invites the assumption: the sidebar keeps a single fixed order for everyone. Your answers here do not hide, reveal, or reorder navigation. What genuinely changes your first screen is the question on the next page, what you want to do first.

Step three: your email and password

Email, and a password of at least eight characters. That is the whole form.

If something is off, you land back on the register page with the reason at the top:

• "Enter a valid email."
• "Use a password with at least 8 characters."
• "An account already exists with this email. Sign in instead."

The last one has a friendly edge case behind it. If you started signing up before and never finished, registering again with the same email and password picks up where you left off rather than refusing you.

When the account is created you go straight to Get started, the walkthrough covered in adding your first website.

Arriving from an invite or a submission link

Two other doors lead to the same wizard, and both keep their context.

If someone invited your site, your link includes an invite token and the page opens with a green line naming them: "{Inviter} invited {your site} to collaborate on Rankbank." Finishing registration marks that invitation accepted.

If you arrived from a site's public submission page at /submit/{slug}, you came through the Create a free account button. That page tells you what happens next in an alert titled "You won't lose your place": "After you sign in, you'll come straight back here with {site} already selected." It means it. Once you have an account you land in the guest post intake with the destination already chosen. See submitting your first guest post.

Signing in later

The sign-in page is /login. It is headed Sign in with the line "Access your Rankbank workspace with your email and password," and carries two links underneath: Forgot password and Create account. If you are already signed in, both /login and /register send you to your dashboard rather than showing you a form you do not need.

Forgot password asks for your email address and tells you: "Enter your email and Rankbank will send password reset instructions if an account can receive them." Submitting shows Check your email with "If an account exists for that email, reset instructions have been sent". That hedge is deliberate: the page never confirms or denies whether an address is registered.

Accounts with a workspace, and accounts without

The distinction shows up everywhere, so it is worth naming early.

An account with no workspace belongs to someone writing for other people's sites. In the sidebar footer it is labelled Guest Author, and where an organisation name would sit it says "Public contributor account". It can submit guest posts, track them through review, reply to editor comments, and collect verified work in the Content Library. What it cannot do is manage a site, because there is no site attached to it.

An account with a workspace belongs to someone running one or more sites. The same footer shows your role, or Website owner if no role has been assigned yet, with your organisation's name underneath. That account gets the site machinery: audits, link swaps, the content calendar, guest post rules for the sites you own.

You are not stuck on either side. Adding a site later gives a writer's account a workspace, and a site owner never loses the writing tools. The header switch described in writer view and site owner view decides which half of the product you are looking at, and switching is always allowed.

Where to go next

Add the site you manage in adding your first website, or, if you are here to write for other people, go straight to guest posting on Rankbank.