After more than two years of development and harnessing some pretty advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, today’s the day we announce the biggest development in Rocketspark history.
We know from working with thousands of clients around the world that the number 1 thing small business owners have struggled with when setting up their website, is setting their website up well for Google searches. Now I’m talking about designing with SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in mind—pretty overwhelming right. We’ve found that in addition to businesses struggling with the basics of SEO, many of our clients struggle with knowing how to write quality content for their website, content that not only showcases their business but also contains important little breadcrumbs for Google to pick up (think business name, location, value propositions etc).
At Rocketspark, over the last 10 years we’ve tried all kinds of ways to help our clients understand the basics of SEO to get their websites ranking high up in Google search results with the best of them. We’ve packed info into emails, in-app pop-ups, blogs posts, live workshops, 1-on-1 training, videos and seminars, online classes and more—and while these resources have helped some, many clients still struggle with the time involved to wrap their mind around SEO! But we get it, we understand that business owners are busy people and so we just really wanted to invent a better way to streamline the entire process, whether you’re new to websites or you already have a website.
Flint SEO helper to the rescue!
But first, what exactly is Flint? Flint is a suite of SEO tools built from the ground up by the Rocketspark team, exclusively for Rocketspark customers. Flint will help you optimise your website for search engines like Google. You can use Flint to help you set-up your Rocketspark website in a way that Google likes, or to improve the SEO of an existing Rocketspark site.
There’s a range of aspects to SEO and Google looks at over 200 ranking factors. Flint helps you get set up with some of the most important ones like meta title, meta description, keyword-rich on-page content and more.
Flint can actually write content for you
Flint uses artificial intelligence to write unique content for your website like title tags, description tags and even on-page content that’s keyword-rich and relevant to your business, industry and location.
It’s taken a lot of research and development to build this solution and for machine learning (Flint) to learn the content for different industries. With search ranking improvements taking time to manifest in search engines and also considering external factors that affect rankings we’re delighted to now bring Flint to the market.
If you’re at the beginning stages of setting-up your website, Flint can actually write suggested page content for you! Over the last few months Flint has been trained to write content appropriate for your industry, that incorporates your SEO keywords, business name and more. Flint won’t write all of the content for your website but having a few suggested paragraphs really helps get the ball rolling on content creation for a new website—showing businesses the kind of content that will work well both for visitors and for Google’s bots crawling the site for searches.
Flint may not write perfect text 100% of the time (it is a computer brain after all) so sometimes you might want to tweak the content, but Flint is the perfect cure for writer’s block and will get you off to a great start.
If you’ve already got a Rocketspark website but you aren’t getting as much engagement as you’d like from online enquiries or purchases, let Flint help you. Flint can check your website and give you a birds-eye view of how well all of your pages are optimised for Google search. Flint will then suggest tweaks you can make to your pages to improve your SEO scores.
The story behind Flint
SEO has always been challenging for Rocketspark clients and the idea of an SEO helper has been something we’ve wanted to do at Rocketspark since the company first started out back in 2010. So now as technology like AI and machine learning has evolved, we’ve seen the opportunity for our original dream to become a reality for our clients.
Funding the idea
We’ve been fortunate to have received a New Zealand Government Growth Grant through Callaghan Innovation which has helped to fund some of Flint’s research and development.
Over two consecutive years we’ve also received Callaghan Innovation Student Grants, allowing us to create opportunities for up and coming students to have legitimate experience with market-relevant AI and machine learning. Those students were Rhys, Hongyu, Ben and Andrei from the University of Waikato. We were extremely happy to hear that Rhys has since successfully been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue his learning.
Who should use Flint?
- Anyone with a Rocketspark website, who wants to make it easier for their customers and potential customers to find their business online in search engines.
- Flint currently uses AI to write some amazingly good quality page and SEO content as a starting point for small businesses in a range of industries. Builders, accountants, florists and many more industries will benefit from Flint. Flint isn’t perfect for every industry just yet but when you sign up to Flint you can see whether Flint is optimised for your industry as we roll out improvements for more industries.
- If you’re just starting out in business or you have a tight budget, using Flint for your SEO can reduce how much you might have to spend on paid advertising.
- Flint isn’t a replacement for SEO experts but typically most small businesses can’t afford SEO specialists when they first start out. So Flint is about helping SMEs do the basics that they’re not doing currently. Setting the foundation for success online.
- Graphic/web designers wanting to offer their clients on a smaller budget a one-stop website solution.
"Flint has been a really fundamental new feature, not only for me, but more importantly for my clients on Rocketspark. Being able to see how well keywords and SEO modifications are tracking on-the-fly, makes the back-end process a lot easier while adding information. I'll typically add and tweak SEO aspects while I build a client's site, and Flint is now a standard feature used. I love how user friendly Flint is -plus, it looks great too, which is also a benefit to my clients to visually understand how important their SEO is."
Natalie White / Graphic Designer / Magic Fingers Graphics
Where to next?
Flint is an amazing set of SEO tools that’s already been trialled successfully by Rocketspark trialists (anyone who signed up on a 30 day free trial after 7 July 2020), Rocketspark Design Partners and a small selection of clients who we sought feedback from.
As it's still early days and as it goes with any new software product, we’ll continue to actively listen to customer feedback and improve and refine Flint over time.
Flint’s current version is just the beginning of a huge range of powerful marketing tools we are dreaming up that will help make marketing and SEO truly accessible to small business owners so they’ll have more time to do business and still receive the benefits that great SEO can deliver.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature. Please get in touch to let us know how Flint has helped you!
