## **🗺️ 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.

1. From the left sidebar, navigate to **OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation)** (URL: `/seo-automation-v3`).
2. Open your project and click **Settings**.
3. Locate the **URL Exclusions** section.
4. 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
5. 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.

1. Inside your project, navigate to **Site Audit → Overview** (Website Overview) and click the **Recrawl Site** button.
2. Confirm the action when prompted.
3. 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.

1. From the left sidebar, click **Keywords** (URL: `/research/keyword-researcher`).
2. In the **Keyword Researcher**, enter your target keyword and run a search to see volume, difficulty, and SERP data.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.

1. Go to **OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation)** in the left sidebar and open the affected project.
2. 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.
3. 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.