Google reads the code, not the design.
Beautiful sites rank badly every day.
Most small business sites are not losing to better content. They are losing to a blocked crawler, a broken canonical, a four-second load and a missing schema — five things nobody ever checked. We find them, fix them, and show you the list.
BlackCarrot is a technical SEO agency based in London, UK. We run technical SEO audits for small and mid-size businesses and fix what the audit finds — crawling and indexing, Core Web Vitals, structured data, site architecture, international SEO with hreflang, and keyword-led content in every language you sell in. We are a German and Arabic speaking SEO agency as well as an English one. Technical SEO audits start at GBP 260 (EUR 299, SAR 1,300) and are delivered in one week.
Free · no signup · 60 seconds · the same check we run on our own six sites
Four technical layers. Each one can quietly cancel out the other three.
A technical SEO audit is a systematic check of everything that decides whether a search engine can reach, read, understand and rank your pages — before a single word of content is written. It covers crawling and indexing, redirects and canonicals, page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, structured data, internal linking, sitemaps and, for multilingual sites, hreflang.
It is not a keyword report. A keyword report tells you what to write; a technical SEO audit tells you why what you already wrote is not ranking. For most small business sites, the second question is the one that is actually costing money — and it is the cheaper of the two to answer.
Beautiful sites rank badly every day.
Fewer clicks reach a website than five years ago. That does not make search optional — it makes the remaining clicks worth more, and it punishes the sites that were never technically sound. Three measured numbers, not opinions:
US desktop and mobile searches, January to April 2026. The searcher is served on the results page itself. Winning the remaining third is now a technical discipline, not a volume game.
Source: SparkToro analysis of Similarweb panel data, published 9 June 2026.When an AI summary sits above the results, the share of searches leading to any click falls from 15% to 8%. The pages that still get clicked are the ones that rank and load and answer fast.
Source: Pew Research Center, 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults, March 2025.Up from 36% a year earlier. AI Overviews are built on Google's own index — so classic ranking work is the entry ticket to being quoted, not a separate exercise.
Source: BrightEdge, February 2025 to February 2026 tracked-query data.SEO wins a position in a list of links. GEO wins a mention inside an AI answer. They rest on the same technical base, and they are not the same work. This page is about the first. The second has its own page.
Competing for a position in a list of links.
Competing to be the source quoted inside the answer.
Want both under one retainer? That is the Search Visibility package further down — SEO and GEO in one engagement, one report, one invoice.
Nothing here is theory. Every one of these was run on our own six sites before it was ever sold to a client.
robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirect chains, orphan pages, and the pages Search Console quietly refuses to index. This is where the majority of small business ranking problems actually live — and it is the cheapest layer to fix.
LCP, INP and CLS measured on real mobile hardware, not on a fast laptop. Image formats, font loading, deferred tracking, render-blocking scripts. Our own sites reach 98–100 on PageSpeed and stay there.
Organization, Service, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList — written so the markup agrees with the visible text. Schema that contradicts the page is worse than no schema at all, and it is a common finding.
A flat, deliberate structure where every commercial page is reachable in three clicks, topic clusters link to each other, and link equity flows to the pages that actually earn money instead of to the imprint.
Reciprocal hreflang across every language including x-default, one real translated page per market, its own keyword set, its own schema and its own currency — never a machine-translated copy. English, German and Arabic in-house.
A keyword map that separates commercial intent from informational, longtails that a small site can realistically win, and pages written to answer rather than to hit a density target. Reported with the queries that moved, not vanity rankings.
These are the findings that come back again and again on small and mid-size business sites — including sites that were built by an agency and were never technically wrong on purpose.
“Crawled — currently not indexed” and “Discovered — currently not indexed” are not a Google bug. They are a verdict on thin, duplicate or unreachable pages, and they are fixable.
www and non-www both answering, or http still resolving, splits every ranking signal in half. One line of server config, and it is a genuinely common finding.
Most owners test on desktop over office wifi. Google measures a mid-range Android on mobile data. That gap is where the ranking is lost, and it never shows up in the office.
A price in the schema that no longer matches the price on screen, a review count nobody can verify, an address that differs from the footer. Search engines notice, and trust drops.
hreflang has to be reciprocal. If the German page lists the English one but not the other way round, the whole cluster is ignored and each language competes against itself.
Cannibalisation: two of your own pages compete for the same query, so neither wins. It is invisible without a keyword map, and it is one of the fastest fixes on the list.
Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Blackcarrot Tech is not affiliated with any of them.
Paste your address. Our free website audit reads your site the way a search engine does and tells you, in plain words, what is holding the rankings back.
Six live products and brands across nine languages and five markets — inside our own group and outside it. Every technique on this page ran here before it was ever sold. Five are public: click through and check the source.
Four steps. The first one you can start yourself, right now, for free.
Where you stand and what is blocking you, in priority order. Start with the free website audit — it checks robots.txt, sitemap, indexability, Core Web Vitals, schema and heading structure in about a minute. The paid audit goes deeper: Search Console data, a crawl of every page, competitor comparison and a keyword map.
Crawl rules, canonicals, redirects, speed, schema, sitemap. Usually the fastest win on the list and often the one that has been quietly cancelling out everything else you paid for.
A keyword map per language, cannibalisation resolved, commercial pages rewritten to match real search intent, internal links pointed at the pages that earn money.
Monthly Search Console reporting on the queries that actually moved, new pages for the gaps worth closing, and — if you take the combined package — AI citation measurement alongside it.
Depending on how far along you are. Every engagement starts with a real look at your site — never a template.
Where you stand technically, and what to fix first.
The audit plus the full fix — technical, content and schema, in up to three languages.
Both disciplines under one retainer: ranked in Google and quoted by the AI engines.
Audit prices are fixed: £260 · €299 · SAR 1,300, one-off, no VAT charged. Everything beyond the audit is quoted on scope — tell us your site and the queries you want to win, and we will price it properly, or tell you that you do not need us yet. GEO on its own has its own page and its own audit. Full service pricing here.
The questions business owners actually ask us about ranking in search.
Deeper reading: SEO vs GEO — the difference · What is GEO? · GEO for AI search
Run the free audit first. If the result is worth a conversation, we will have one. If it is not, you keep the report and we will say so.
Free · no signup · 60 seconds · Cakglo Ltd, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ