What is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a schedule that plans what content you'll create and when you'll publish it. It maps out blog posts, topics, target keywords, and publication dates, helping you maintain consistency and strategic focus.

Think of it as your content roadmap. Instead of scrambling to decide what to write next, you have a plan that ensures you're covering important topics systematically and publishing regularly.

Why editorial calendars matter

Consistency drives SEO results. Search engines reward sites that publish regularly with more frequent crawling and better rankings. An editorial calendar helps you maintain that consistency.

Planning ahead also improves content quality. When you map topics in advance, you can identify content gaps, avoid keyword cannibalization, and ensure your content builds topical authority rather than randomly targeting unrelated keywords.

What to include

At minimum, track publication dates and post titles. More detailed calendars include target keywords, search intent, assigned writers, and content status (idea, outlined, drafted, edited, published).

For strategic content, note how posts fit together. Which posts belong to a content cluster? Which are cornerstone content versus supporting posts? This helps you build cohesive topic coverage.

Some calendars also track internal links to add when new posts publish. If you're writing a post about keyword research, note which existing posts should link to it once it's live.

How to create one

Start simple. A spreadsheet with columns for date, title, keyword, status, and notes works fine. As you grow, you might move to specialized tools like Notion, Airtable, or dedicated content calendar software.

Plan 4-8 weeks ahead minimum. This gives you buffer time and lets you batch similar tasks. You can research keywords for multiple posts at once, then move to writing multiple drafts.

Review and adjust regularly. If a planned post no longer makes sense or you discover a more important topic, change the plan. The calendar serves you, not the other way around.

Editorial calendar vs content calendar

These terms are often used interchangeably, but content calendar technically includes all content (social media, emails, videos) while editorial calendar focuses specifically on editorial content like blog posts and articles.

For most bloggers, the distinction doesn't matter much. Just pick one term and stick with it on your team to avoid confusion.