Prerequisites
- How Content Plans Work — What a plan contains before you review it
Review and Approve a Content Plan
A finished plan is a set of proposals, not a commitment. This is how you read it, judge it topic by topic, and decide what actually gets made.
Before You Begin
When a build finishes, Zyntro drops you straight onto the plan. Everything on the screen is a proposal — the plan's status is Draft, no content has been written, and nothing is scheduled.
Your job here is triage. Some topics will be obviously right, some obviously wrong, and a few will need you to open them and read the reasoning before you can tell. The screen is built for that: the funnel counts are filters, every topic title opens a full brief, and you can act on one topic or on a whole batch.
The one thing to understand before you start is what the tick boxes are for. Ticking topics builds a selection, and the action bar above the table changes to act on that selection instead of on the whole plan. Nothing happens to your selection until you click one of its buttons.
Steps
Get your bearings
The heading at the top of the page is the plan's source — the offering's name for an offering plan, or the audience segment's name for an audience plan. That alone tells you which of the two kinds of plan you are looking at.
On an audience plan you will also see a line reading Speaking to this audience through: followed by the offerings the content argues from. Two plans built for the same audience are distinguished by that line, so it is worth reading before you assume you are in the right plan.
To the right of the funnel counts is Primary Objective — what this plan is trying to achieve, in a sentence. If Zyntro also inferred a secondary objective it appears as a small grey badge beside the heading, and the reasoning behind both appears underneath.
Read the projections, then treat them as a ceiling
The left-hand column estimates what the plan could deliver if every topic in it were produced and published.
Organic Traffic is the large orange number, counting up when the page loads. It is the estimated monthly visits for the plan as a whole, with Min and Max underneath showing the range of the raw keyword estimates.
The headline number is not the midpoint of that range. Zyntro discounts each topic by how competitive its keyword actually is — a low-competition keyword keeps most of its upside, a high-competition one keeps very little. That is why the headline often sits well below Max, and it is the more honest number of the three.
Potential Leads and Potential Sales are derived from it using the two sliders in the orange card: Visitor to Leads Conversion Rate and Leads to Sales Conversion Rate. Drag either and both figures recalculate immediately.
Keyword Opportunity is different in kind — it is not a projection but a count of how much keyword research Zyntro holds for this plan's offerings, labelled Medium, High, Very High or Extreme. A high number means there is plenty of material left to build further plans from.
Narrow the list by funnel stage
The three coloured cards — Top/Entry, Middle and Bottom — count the topics at each stage of the funnel. They are also filters.
Click a card and the table shows only that stage. The card you clicked keeps its colour and gains an orange ring; the other two fade back so the counts stay readable as context. A Clear filter button appears beside the Funnel Stages heading, and clicking the active card a second time clears the filter too. The cards work from the keyboard as well — tab to one and press Enter or Space.
Filtering is the practical way to review a plan, because the three stages need different judgement. Top-of-funnel topics are about being found; Bottom-of-funnel topics are about closing someone who already knows you. Reviewing them mixed together makes both harder.
Open a topic and read its brief
Click any topic title and a drawer opens from the right with everything Zyntro decided about that one piece.
Start with Content Reasoning at the top — that is Zyntro's argument for why this topic belongs in the plan, and it is the field that actually helps you judge. The funnel badge sits next to it.
Below that the drawer is grouped: Content Overview (content type, search intent, content goal, content angle, author tone), Keywords (the primary keyword and the supporting keywords as chips), Traffic & Conversions (the monthly estimate for this topic alone), Call to Actions (primary and secondary), and Recommended Assets — the tables, checklists or visuals Zyntro thinks the piece needs.
Taken together that is a writing brief. If you produce the content through Zyntro these fields drive it; if you hand it to a writer, this is the panel to copy.
Close the drawer with the red X, by clicking the dimmed backdrop, or by pressing Escape.
Approve or reject topics one at a time
The Actions column at the end of each row holds two icons: a green check to approve the topic and a red cross to reject it. The same pair sits at the top of the topic drawer, so you can decide without closing it.
Click one and a brief Updating… indicator appears, then the icons in that row are replaced by the word Approved in green or Rejected in red. That is the row's permanent display from then on.
Rejecting a topic does not delete it. It records your decision on the topic so that it is excluded from what you intend to produce, and it stays in the plan and in the counts.
Act on a batch with the selection bar
Tick the box at the start of each topic row you want to act on. The box in the table header selects every row currently visible — so with a funnel filter applied, it means that stage only. It shows a partial state when some visible rows are ticked and some are not.
As soon as anything is ticked, the action bar above the table changes. The plan-wide buttons step aside and four selection buttons take their place, alongside a count of what you have chosen:
- Approve & schedule — records an approval on every selected topic, then opens the scheduler for exactly those topics. This is the normal path: these are the ones I want, so log that and let me put dates on them.
- Schedule only — opens the scheduler for the selection without changing any statuses. Use it when you are laying out dates and do not want to commit to a decision yet.
- Reject — rejects every selected topic and clears the selection. The rows update in place.
- Clear — drops the selection and brings the plan-wide buttons back.
Nothing happens until you click one of them. Ticking and unticking is free.
Or decide the whole plan in one go
With nothing ticked, the action bar shows the two plan-wide icons, and the line beside them reads Acts on all N topics so there is no doubt about their reach.
Approve every topic in this plan and Reject every topic in this plan set the status of every topic and of the plan itself. Both ask you to confirm first, naming the number of topics involved, because they overwrite decisions you may already have made row by row.
A good way to use Approve all is as the start of a review rather than the end: approve everything, then reject the handful you do not want individually.
Coming back to a plan you have already scheduled
Once any topic in a plan has a date on it, two things change on this screen.
A calendar icon joins the plan-wide buttons, titled View the schedule for this plan. Clicking it opens the scheduler for the whole plan so you can see what is booked. Beside the icon bar a line reads N of M items scheduled, so you can tell at a glance how much of the plan is committed.
To adjust just part of a scheduled plan, tick the topics you care about and use Schedule only — that opens the scheduler for those topics alone.
Result
You have been through the plan, recorded a decision on the topics you judged, and sent the ones you want produced to the scheduler.
Topics you approved carry that status until they are scheduled and then produced. Topics you rejected stay in the plan as a record of the decision — they are not deleted and they still count in the funnel totals. Nothing has been written or charged for at this point.
The plan's own status keeps up with your decisions. It shows Approved once every topic in it is approved, Rejected once every topic is rejected, and Draft while the picture is mixed — however you recorded those decisions. Once you save a schedule it becomes Running and stops tracking the topics, because by then the work is committed.
Tip: A workable order for a first plan: filter to Bottom, because those topics are closest to revenue and the easiest to judge. Tick the ones worth making and use Approve & schedule. Come back and do Middle, then Top.
