🎯 Overview

Search Atlas offers a guided onboarding experience to help you get the most out of OTTO. Before OTTO makes any changes to your site, you can configure safety controls to protect your existing high-quality technical SEO, structured data, and schemas. This article explains how to book an onboarding call and how to use OTTO's pre-deployment controls to keep your best work intact.

📅 How to Book an Onboarding Call

All Search Atlas plans include access to a live onboarding session with our team. To schedule yours:

1. Log in to your Search Atlas account.
2. Open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform.
3. Type onboarding call to connect with our team and select a time that works for you.

During the call, a specialist will walk you through your account setup, OTTO configuration, and any site-specific requirements — including how to protect existing SEO elements.

⚙️ Understanding OTTO Deployment Safety Controls

OTTO is designed to improve your site's SEO automatically, but it gives you full control over what it can and cannot change. Safety controls let you define boundaries before any deployment happens, so OTTO never overwrites work you want to preserve.

To access OTTO and its settings, go to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) (URL: /seo-automation-v3).

🔒 How to Protect Existing Technical SEO and Schemas

Follow these steps to prevent OTTO from overriding your existing high-quality technical SEO elements, structured data, or schemas:

1. Navigate to Left sidebar → OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation).
2. Select your connected site and open the OTTO Settings panel.
3. Review the list of deployable SEO categories (e.g., meta tags, schema markup, canonical tags, structured data).
4. For any category you want to protect, toggle the deployment switch to Off before activating OTTO.
5. For schema and structured data specifically, enable the Preserve Existing Schema option if shown — this instructs OTTO to skip pages or elements that already have valid structured data in place.
6. Review the pre-deployment summary to confirm which changes OTTO will and will not apply.
7. When you are satisfied with the configuration, click Deploy.

OTTO will only act within the boundaries you have set. You can update these settings at any time before or after deployment.

✅ Pre-Deployment Checklist

Before you deploy OTTO on a live site, we recommend completing the following:

• Attend your onboarding call — a specialist can review your site's existing SEO and help you configure safety controls correctly.
• Audit your current schemas — identify pages with structured data, rich snippets, or custom technical SEO that you want to preserve.
• Disable categories you own — turn off any OTTO deployment categories that overlap with your existing optimisations.
• Test on staging first — if possible, connect a staging domain to validate OTTO's changes before pushing to production. Note: subdomain and staging domain deployments are on our product roadmap and coming soon.
• Review the deployment summary — always check what OTTO plans to change before confirming.

💡 Tips for Getting the Best Results

• OTTO works best when given clear scope. The more precisely you define what it can and cannot touch, the more confident you can be in its output.
• If you have pages with manually crafted schema markup (e.g., FAQ, HowTo, Product schemas), disable schema deployment for those page types to keep your custom work intact.
• Use OTTO's deployment categories to introduce changes gradually — start with lower-risk elements like title tags and meta descriptions before expanding to technical SEO.
• After deployment, monitor the OTTO SEO → Site Audit → Live Monitoring (Alerts Detected) to review what was applied and flag anything you want to roll back.

🆘 Need 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.