Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

Creating a cohesive, intent-driven editorial calendar insures that your investment into content creation delivers a strong return on your investment.  Much too often people create content for their sites without purpose, wasting the time and money that it takes to produce content.

How do you define your editorial strategy?

First, you need to figure out your main objectives.  Some potential objectives include:

  • Keyword Articles (for SEO)
  • Target Persona
  • Buying Stage
  • Thought Leadership

Not every single article needs to be optimized for SEO, but if all of your articles are focused on Buying Stage or Thought Leadership, you may be losing potential traffic from organic SEO.

So the first stage is knowing your content production cadence and most important objectives.

Once you’ve defined this, the next step is creating an editorial calendar that reflects all of these objectives, as well as available writers, due dates, target keywords, and more.

In this article, we’ll share a method that you can use to create editorial calendar example templates using Gryffin.

How to Create an Editorial Calendar Example Template with Gryffin

Most people are used to creating editorial calendars using excel templates or spreadsheets.  The problem? These are antiquated and one-dimensional. It’s difficult to keep these updated as your content goes through the creation and editorial process, and it’s difficult to track other elements such as cost, multimedia assets, and more. 

With Gryffin, your editorial strategy starts before you even create your template.  It starts with identifying opportunities based on competitor research, or by monitoring your own Google Search Console data to monitor for opportunities.

Gryffin has 2 components for mapping editorial calendars:

  1. The Editorial Calendar
  2. The Editorial Workspace

The Gryffin Editorial Calendar

The Gryffin Editorial Calendar

Your editorial calendar is a drag and drop calendar where you can map out your themes, content ideas, keywords, and more from the left column, then drag and drop them into your actual calendar based on the date that you’ll be publishing your articles.

The Gryffin Editorial Workspace

Once you’ve mapped out your calendar, you can create projects for each content piece.  These get created in your editorial workspace, which uses a custom template and workflow focused on the content creation process.

The Gryffin Editorial Workspace

The workspace table allows you to see every content piece that you have in the pipeline at once.  It’s like a spreadsheet, where you can filter, sort, and even edit the data from the workspace view.

Once you click on one of the projects, you’ll be able to see the details of each particular content piece.  Here you can add all the details for each content piece, the writer, editor, due date, order details, chat and ask questions, and even track the invoicing process for the article if you use external writers.

Customizing your Editorial Workspace

Instead of having a flat “spreadsheet” type template, Gryffin allows you to view everything as a spreadsheet, but you can have the added depth of creating tasks, tracking each project, uploading files, and much more inside the project.

Customizing your Editorial Workspace

Gryffin allows teams to create personalized workspaces for each client or campaign.  If you are an agency, you can have an editorial space for each client, or simply one editorial space that tracks all content pieces for every client.

If you are an in-house team, you can create an editorial space for each content type, from blog articles, outreach articles, to marketing assets, to videos and infographics, and so on.   

Data-Driven Strategies to create an Editorial Calendar Template

Most marketers understand the importance of including keywords in their strategies, but it can get complicated very fast.  Which keywords have already been used in the past, so you don’t repeat target keywords? What articles on your site are gaining traction, and could rank better with a bit of help?  What are some low hanging fruit opportunities based on competitor data?

Bringing in all of these elements into your editorial calendar is easy with Gryffin.

With Gryffin’s built in integrations, you can use data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush to build your editorial strategy:

  • Under Admin > Company, click on “Integrations”.  Follow the steps to connect your Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush accounts.

editorial calendar is easy with Gryffin

  • Click on the Site Console from the left menu
  • Once you’ve opened up the site console, you’ll need to do a quick Google search about a client’s competitor. On the competitor’s page grab the URL to insert in the site console to reveal the keywords for that site.  You’ll be able to view the top-ranking keywords from a competitor’s site to optimize your client’s messaging.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

  • Select those top keywords and add the keywords to the keyword section on the console and select the client from the drop down box.  This will add your target keywords to your keyword list.
  • Select keywords that you’d like to use as part of your editorial strategy.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

  • Dragging the keywords associates these terms with a particular messaging; your writers will then know that these keywords need to be integrated into content.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

  • From here, you can drag and drop your keywords from the left column, to a date in the calendar, and click on “create event”.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

  • To create the project, click on the yellow box, and you’ll get a pop up where you can add more details.  From there, you can click on “create project”. This will create a project for the content piece, and start the content creation workflow.
  • Your project should be at an initial stage such as “Need to Order” or “Ordered”.  Once you’ve set up your custom workflows, your articles will go through all of the stages of the content creation process, creating tasks for the designated team members to do the work.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

Once your content is written and uploaded to your site, you can then create an “experiment” to track how your content is doing, when it’s starting to rank, and more. 

Using Google Search Console to Optimize Your Editorial Calendar

With Gryffin, you also can utilize Google Search Console data to revamp pages that are losing traction, or to enhance pages that are starting to gain improved visibility. 

Here’s how to create optimized and better performing messaging and tasks utilizing info from Google Search Console (GSC).

1.  Click on Google Search Console (GSC) under “Site Console”

Google Search Console In Gryffin

2.  Type in the client’s web site

3.  You’ll be given the option to select either ‘Page’ or ‘Query.’ Choose ‘Query.’

4.  Now you can select the time period to compare the performance of your search queries.  You can select any time frame to compare data between periods.

5.  Hit apply. Now the data will compare the two periods and your team can analyze keyword performance.  You can sort by “Diff Clicks” to see the keywords that have lost traffic, and those that have gained.

Looking for an Editorial Calendar Example Template?

From here, you can select these keywords to add to your keyword list, and then create projects with their corresponding task workflow.

How to Maximize your Editorial Calendar Template with Data

Seeing what phrases are underperforming lets you reevaluate messaging and better optimize content at the individual page level. Once you see what is working and what isn’t, you can create projects to do on-page SEO or content revamps to help elevate underperforming keywords to rank better.  Most importantly, you can revamp the articles by improving your on-page SEO, adding more keyword-optimized content, FAQ’s to target featured snippets, and more. 

Once you have the keywords that you need to boost for the client, you’ll need to click on the page link in the Editorial Calendar workspace. The page space will show you the exact page or pages that featured the underperforming keywords. This is the content you’ll want to modify for the client.

Now go back to the editorial calendar home page and select the underperforming keywords. These phrases will be highlighted, and you can then drag them to the monthly calendar.

Dragging the keywords once again associates them with a particular project. This allows editors to understand that the keywords must be featured in the content project order.

What if My Agency Doesn’t Need to Optimize for Keywords? 

Not all agencies or communication teams are driven solely by SEO content. While many clients need their content optimized for SEO, clients also may need content that is designed for a particular buying stage. 

For example, if you’re writing blog content for a clothing company, content might need to be written with the understanding that the consumer already plans to make a purchase (the “bottom of the funnel”). You’re not focusing on the content of ‘if’ a client will buy a dress, but what dress that client might wish to purchase from the site.

Gryffin lets your team create content that is optimized for buying stages. Ideally, use top-ranking words and phrases to integrate into content and then focus the editorial voice for a particular buying stage. However, you can simply generate content orders focused on the buying stage demands.

So Why Gryffin?

There are so many software companies available that enable an agency to organize and order content. So what’s so special about Gryffin and why does your agency need the software?

There are so many choices, but Gryffin’s ease of design and simple task creation options make it the ideal choice for agencies that don’t have time to figure out cumbersome alternatives. Gryffin’s editorial calendar option integrates SEO intelligence from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to allow the agency to better optimize content and rework underperforming pages.

Gryffin isn’t just workflow software, it’s a diagnostic tool to help agencies discover what isn’t working for their client’s online health and helps prescribe solutions to get results and increase visibility. Agencies can quickly and easily research keywords of competitors to better engage audiences and boost their client’s rankings.

The best part about the editorial calendar is its simplicity. Tasks can quickly be ordered once they are created in the calendar, and then the workflow tools kick in. The editorial calendar will update each task as the project stages are completed. Editors will receive a notification that they need to send a task to an illustrator or post the article online.

Gryffin allows agencies and teams to create editorial calendars faster and more strategically. Rankings are no longer a guessing game, because with Gryffin all the analytical data for each page is available to the team. Every keyword’s data can be scrutinized and reevaluated to ensure that pages perform well and visibility remains high.

Want to try out Gryffin for free to see if it works for your agency? Sign up now for a seven day trial and evaluate all the features to help simplify your workflow and get the results your clients demand.