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The planning beat that opens each monthly cycle. Every cycle after onboarding (Month 1) starts here: pull the constraints together, run the keyword cycle, and lay out the month’s content plan before any production starts. It’s one turn of the operating rhythm — onboarding, then this, then weekly execution, then the client review, and repeat.

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Starting constraints

Before you plan a cycle, gather the inputs that bound it:
  • Billing timeline: when the cycle starts and ends. This frames the publish and review dates.
  • Planned output for the cycle: how many landing pages and blog posts you’re committing to this month.
  • Strategy / meeting transcript: the latest client call (Granola transcript plus enhanced notes) and any post-call materials. This carries most of the month’s direction.
  • Previous cycle’s results: the last set of keywords, the content produced, and how it performed (rankings, indexing, conversion). New plans calibrate from this rather than from guesses.
Planning runs about a week before the cycle renews, so the next cycle can start the moment the current one ends. It has two halves. First, a performance review of the cycle that’s closing: which keywords and pages ranked, the top-performing content angles, and what the search-console data shows. Second, the strategy for the next cycle: source new keywords, decide angles and topics, set the output split across landing pages and blogs, and adjust from what’s working.

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The flow

Monthly planning is the connective tissue between the client review and a month of execution. At a high level:
  1. Feed Pi the call context. Paste the transcript, enhanced notes, and post-call materials into Pi and save to memory. This is Step 1 of Organise keywords for a cycle.
  2. Run the keyword cycle. Draft, validate, dedupe, tag, and execute the cycle’s keywords. This is the whole of 3.4 Organise keywords for a cycle, and the keyword plan is the core output of monthly planning.
  3. Plan the month’s content. Turn the tagged keyword plan into a content schedule (which landing pages and blog posts, in what order) for the weeks ahead.
Monthly planning produces a written strategy and keyword doc. Pi writes it to memory under /reports/, and it surfaces in the client’s Notion strategy doc and in the monthly review. It carries the cycle dates, the output split across deliverables, the focus, and the tagged keyword plan for the cycle. Two rules shape the plan. Front-load it: plan for the whole cycle’s content to be generated in the first week of the new cycle, so the publisher always has a bank to draw from and never runs dry mid-cycle. And build in a buffer: plan about 15% more than you’ve committed (if you owe 40 pages, target 46), because some drafts get rejected and you’d rather delete a few than scramble to top up. A smaller buffer of roughly 10% carries into deployment for the same reason.

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Weekly execution

Once the month is planned, it runs on a weekly beat of produce, publish, index, and audit, described in 3.3 Weekly planning flow.

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Calibrating from data

We plan monthly, rather than producing continuously, so each cycle calibrates from real results. Each plan is shaped by what actually ranked and converted last cycle. See Part 1 §1.10 Attribution and the review SOPs (3.7 Review prep, 3.8 Running the review).