Ripe Planner Guide

Ripe Planner is a keyword research and content-planning tool built for food creators. It helps you decide which recipes to make, when to publish them, and how they build your search authority over time. Anything with a + next to it expands in place with more detail. Need every last detail on a specific feature, tiers, or canceling? See the full documentation.

🎥 Prefer video? Watch the getting-started walkthrough.

🧪 You're testing. Here's what helps most

Ripe Planner is in active development. The most valuable feedback

Anything confusing. If you had to stop and think, that's worth flagging
Anything broken. What you clicked, what you expected, what happened instead
Auto-tag mistakes. Keywords tagged wrong or missing an obvious tag
What's missing. The feature you reached for that wasn't there

Send it all to ripeplanner@gmail.com. Screenshots welcome.

Already have a spreadsheet of your own keyword research? The steps below assume you're starting from nothing. If you're bringing in existing data, do it in this order instead:

Enter your site as a reference point first (Settings → General); everything else measures against it
Set up your statuses and categories to match your spreadsheet before importing, so the column mapping has something to match against
Import your CSV
If your file had no category column, run Auto-categorize keywords (Settings → Data & backup); auto-tagging can only match category-based rules on keywords that already have a category
Then run auto-tagging on the full catalog
Now explore the rest of the app

Jump to a step

1. Create your account 2. Add your first keyword 3. Discover keyword ideas 4. Or import your existing research 5. Let auto-tagging organize everything 6. Plan your calendar 7. Build authority with bundles 8. Track what you published 9. Make it yours

1 Create your account

Open the app, enter your first name, last name, email, and a password of 8 or more characters, then click Create account. Check your inbox for a confirmation link, then sign in.

Your data syncs to the cloud automatically. Use Ripe Planner from any device, and every change saves as you type. Watch for the small Saved indicator in the top bar.

2 Add your first keyword

New accounts start with 10 sample keywords already loaded, so there's something to explore right away. Click + Add keyword in the top bar to add your own. The essentials

Keyword — the search term, for example brown butter chocolate chip cookies
Search volume — how many people search this per month
Difficulty — how strong the current top 10 results are. Details →
Intent — what searchers actually want when they type this. Details →
Seasonality — does searching spike (Mild or Major) or stay steady (Evergreen). Details →
Peak month(s) — when searches spike, used to calculate Go Live By
Your DA check and SERP check — two ways to judge whether you can actually rank for this. Details →
Categories and tags — pick a category yourself, or add the keyword from Discover and Ripe Planner guesses one automatically. Tags work the same way, covered in Step 5. Details →

Everything above feeds a single rubric score from 0 to 100, blending volume, difficulty, timing, and SERP. How scoring works →

💡 Click Auto-fill data… (Novice+) in the flyout to pull real search volume, difficulty, and seasonality automatically instead of entering it by hand. Uses 1 credit, unless we already have recent data for that keyword, in which case it's free.

3 Discover keyword ideas Novice+

Open the Discover tab and type one seed keyword to explore ideas around it, with live volume and difficulty data on every result.

Discover finds what people already search around your seed, pulling related searches and phrases that contain it, plus real sibling ideas from the seed's own words. Use it to explore a topic's real demand. Uses 2 credits per search
Remix invents variations of your seed, for example adding "soft," "sugar free," or "bars" around it, then checks which invented versions people actually search for. Use it to brainstorm twists on a recipe you already have in mind. Uses 1 credit per search

4 Or import your existing research

Click Import CSV in the top bar and upload a spreadsheet from Google Sheets, Excel, or your keyword tool. Ripe Planner matches columns automatically and shows you the mapping before anything imports. Tags generate automatically on import. Free plan imports are capped at 500 rows per file.

5 Let auto-tagging organize everything

Tags group related keywords, for example chicken, cheesecake, thanksgiving, smoked, from over 185 built-in rules covering ingredients, dish formats, holidays, and cooking methods. Tags apply automatically when you add a keyword from Discover or import a CSV. For a manually typed keyword, click Autofill tags in the flyout to run the same rules on demand. You can add your own tags on any keyword too. Turning a rule off or changing what tag it applies is a Pro+ feature.

Singular and plural forms of the same word both fire a rule, but only the singular shows up as its own tag ("apples" and "apple" both tag as apple). When adding a new rule, type the singular form when one exists; the app will warn you if what you typed looks plural. More on plural handling →

Rule controls by tier →

6 Plan your calendar

Open the Recipe planner tab. Your unscheduled keywords sit in the left sidebar, sorted by due date. Drag one onto a month to schedule it. Click a month name for week view, or use day view for shoot day planning.

7 Build authority with bundles Novice+

The Authority planner tab finds groups of keywords in your library worth tackling together, across four cluster types. Save a bundle to track it, or schedule the whole group to your calendar in one click. Details →

8 Track what you published

Open any keyword and scroll to Records. Every keyword includes one free record. Track its recipe name, status, and scheduled date. Novice+ unlocks additional fields on every record: published URL, publish date, Google rank, and traffic, plus the ability to attach more than one record per keyword. Details →

9 Make it yours

In Settings you can rename statuses and pick their colors, edit categories, adjust rubric weights, set lead times per seasonality, and choose what shows on your dashboard. Your plan and keyword usage live under Settings → General. See plans and pricing.

Ripe Planner never hides a feature you don't have access to: a locked feature always shows a lock icon and the tier name that unlocks it. What each tier includes →