🔍 Overview
This article walks you through four common project setup tasks: excluding specific URL paths from your site audit, rerunning the crawl to apply those changes, importing keywords with competitor insights, and understanding why a location may not be generating recommendations.
🚫 Excluding URLs from Your Site Audit
If your project is crawling pages you don't want audited — such as /obituaries/ or /store/ — you can exclude them by URL path before or after the initial crawl.
- Open your project and navigate to the Site Audit section.
- Click Settings or Project Settings near the top of the page.
- Locate the Exclude URLs or Crawl Exclusions field.
- Enter the paths you want to exclude, one per line. For example: /obituaries/ and /store/. You can use partial path matches — any URL containing that string will be excluded.
- Save your settings before proceeding.
Tip: Use a forward slash at the start and end of each path segment (e.g., /store/) to ensure accurate matching and avoid unintended exclusions.
🔄 Rerunning the Crawl After Exclusions
Exclusion rules only apply to future crawls. After saving your exclusions, you must rerun the audit to see updated results.
- Return to the main Site Audit dashboard for your project.
- Click the Recrawl or Rerun Audit button — this is usually found in the top-right area of the audit view.
- Confirm the action when prompted. The crawl will restart and apply your new exclusion rules from the beginning.
- Wait for the crawl to complete. Depending on your site size, this may take a few minutes to an hour.
Once the crawl finishes, any URLs matching your excluded paths will no longer appear in your audit results or issue counts.
📊 Tracking Keywords and Importing Competitor Insights
You can add keywords to your project for rank tracking and enrich them with competitor data at the same time.
- In the left sidebar, click Site Metrics → Keywords to open the Keywords page.
- Search for your target keywords or enter them manually.
- Select the keywords you want to track by checking the boxes next to them.
- Click Add to and assign them to a keyword list or Rank Tracker.
- To import competitor keyword insights, use the Competitor Gap or Competitor Analysis feature within the same tool. Enter a competitor domain to surface keywords they rank for that you may be missing.
- Select the competitor keywords you want to import and add them to your tracking list using the same process above.
Once added, your tracked keywords will appear in the project's keyword dashboard, and ranking data will begin populating within 24 hours.
📍 Why One Location Isn't Generating Recommendations
If you have multiple locations set up and one is producing recommendations while another shows none, there are a few common causes to check.
- Insufficient local data: Search Atlas generates location-based recommendations using local search data. If the target location has low search volume or limited data coverage, the system may not have enough signals to produce recommendations.
- Location not fully configured: Confirm that the location has a complete address, a linked Google Business Profile (if applicable), and the correct target language and country set in its settings.
- Crawl not yet completed for that location: Each location may require its own crawl or content scan. Check whether the location's audit status shows Complete or is still Pending.
- No tracked keywords assigned to that location: Recommendations are often tied to the keywords being tracked. Make sure keywords are assigned to the specific location, not just to the overall project.
- OTTO SEO V3 not enabled for that location: In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → SEO Automation (SEO Automation) (URL: /seo-automation-v3) and verify that the location in question has OTTO SEO V3 activated. If it is toggled off, no recommendations will be generated.
If the location is correctly configured and the crawl is complete but recommendations are still not appearing after 24–48 hours, it is worth reviewing whether the location's primary keyword set has enough search data to trigger the recommendation engine.
✅ Quick Checklist
- URL exclusions saved in project settings before rerunning the crawl
- Crawl rerun after exclusions to apply changes
- Keywords added to tracking and competitor keywords imported
- Problem location has a complete profile, active crawl, assigned keywords, and OTTO SEO V3 enabled
💬 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.