🗺️ Overview
This article walks you through four common workflow tasks in Search Atlas: excluding URL patterns from a project audit, rerunning and verifying a crawl, tracking keywords with competitor insights, and diagnosing why a specific location may not be generating recommendations.
🚫 Step 1: Exclude URL Patterns from Your Audit
You can prevent specific sections of your site from being crawled by adding URL exclusion rules to your project settings.
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From the left sidebar, navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) (URL:
/seo-automation-v3). -
Open your project and click Settings.
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Locate the URL Exclusions section.
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Add each pattern you want to exclude. Use a wildcard asterisk to exclude an entire path and everything beneath it. For example:
/obituaries/*— excludes all pages under the/obituaries/directory/store/*— excludes all pages under the/store/directory
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Click Save to apply your changes.
Wildcard syntax rules: Place the asterisk (*) at the end of a path segment to match everything after it. Exclusions are case-sensitive, so make sure the pattern matches your actual URL structure exactly. You can add multiple exclusion rules — each one goes on its own line.
🔄 Step 2: Rerun the Audit Crawl
After saving your exclusion rules, you need to trigger a new crawl for the changes to take effect.
- Inside your project, navigate to Site Audit → Overview (Website Overview) and click the Recrawl Site button.
- Confirm the action when prompted.
- The crawl will be queued immediately. Depending on the size of your site, crawl completion can take anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours or more for large sites with thousands of pages.
How to verify the crawl has completed:
- Return to your project dashboard and check the Last Crawled timestamp — it should reflect today's date and time once the crawl finishes.
- Review the total pages crawled count. After exclusions are applied, this number should be lower than your previous crawl if the excluded paths contained indexed pages.
- Navigate to the Crawled URLs or Pages report and confirm that no URLs containing
/obituaries/or/store/appear in the results.
If the timestamp has not updated after 24 hours, the crawl may still be processing. Large sites with extensive internal linking can take longer. Avoid triggering a second rerun while the first is still in progress, as this may cause delays.
🔑 Step 3: Track Keywords and Use Competitor Insights
Once your audit is clean, you can track target keywords and layer in competitor data to strengthen your strategy.
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From the left sidebar, click Keywords (URL:
/research/keyword-researcher). -
In the Keyword Researcher, enter your target keyword and run a search to see volume, difficulty, and SERP data.
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To track a keyword, use the Add [keyword] to a keyword list or Rank Tracker link (or the Add to list button) in the Keyword Research/Rank Tracker results. Select the project and target location, then confirm.
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To access Competitor Insights, look for the Competitors tab or panel within the Keyword Researcher or your project's keyword tracking view. Here you can:
- See which competitors rank for the same keywords
- Compare your ranking position against theirs
- Identify keyword gaps — terms competitors rank for that you do not
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Use the Import Keywords option if you have a list prepared outside the platform. Look for the Import button near the top of the keyword tracker, upload a CSV with one keyword per row, and map it to your project and location.
Tip: After importing or adding keywords, allow up to 24 hours for ranking data to populate, especially for newly tracked terms.
📍 Step 4: Troubleshoot Missing Location Recommendations
If one location is generating recommendations in OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) but another is not, work through the following diagnostic steps.
- Go to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) in the left sidebar and open the affected project.
- Check that the location in question has been properly added to your project. Navigate to Project Settings → Locations and confirm the location appears and is marked as active.
- Verify that tracked keywords are assigned to that specific location. A location with no tracked keywords will not generate recommendations. Go to your keyword tracker and filter by location to confirm keywords exist for it.
Understanding auto-refresh and recommendation generation:
- Recommendations are generated after a successful crawl and after keyword ranking data has been collected for the location.
- If a location was added recently, it may need up to 24–48 hours before the system has enough data to produce recommendations.
- Recommendations do not update in real time. The platform refreshes recommendation sets on a scheduled cycle tied to your crawl and rank-tracking intervals.
- If a crawl completed but recommendations are still absent after 48 hours, try manually triggering a Refresh Recommendations action if available in the project dashboard, or rerun the audit for that project.
Common reasons a location shows no recommendations:
- No keywords are tracked for that location
- The location was added after the last crawl completed and a new crawl has not run yet
- The crawl for that project is still in progress
- The target URL for that location was excluded by an existing exclusion rule
💬 Need More Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.