SEO agencies are entering a new era where growth is powered by AI automation that accelerates results. In this episode, Alec shares how he uses OTTO, the AI assistant inside Search Atlas, to simplify client delivery and automate repetitive SEO tasks.
Manick Bhan, sits down with Alec to unpack the real-world impact of automation transforming agency operations. They show how automation saves time, builds consistency, clarity, and boosts client retention.
Alec explains how automations let his team focus on strategy while showing visible results to clients, and Manick emphasizes that OTTO was built to surface the work that matters most, making agencies faster, leaner, and more effective.
Key Segments
00:00 – First impressions of OTTO & automating on-page grunt work
03:30 – Knowledge graphs, keyword research, and better AI outputs
06:00 – Time savings vs. manual site audits (titles, metas, interlinking)
08:00 – Schema automation: pain points, errors, and instant value
11:00 – Efficiency gains for small teams & scaling without over-hiring
13:30 – Schema experiments: rankings boosted with schema alone
17:00 – Client results: early calls, Josh Blakely case, and “rip it vs. review it” debate
20:00 – Cloud stacks at scale: from half-day tasks to 2-second deployment
25:30 – Topical maps: planning content at agency scale with AI
29:30 – Content workflows: outlines, Claude settings, and deliverables
34:00 – Output levels: 70+ quality articles/month across clients
36:30 – GBP optimizations: posts, Q&A, unanswered reviews
39:30 – Reporting: automated summaries, Notion boards, and churn prevention
45:00 – Competitive keyword and backlink gap analysis in sales
49:00 – Site Explorer, backlinks, and diagnosing bad links with clients
52:00 – Rank tracking workflows: web vs. maps, LeadSnap, and SA fixes
55:20 – Supporting service area businesses in Search Atlas
59:00 – Scaling with OTTO vs. scaling with headcount
1:01:30 – Closing thoughts & next steps for agencies using AI
OTTO First Impressions: Automating On-Page SEO Tasks
For agencies, the most time-consuming work often lies in repetitive SEO tasks. OTTO makes a strong first impression by turning these bottlenecks into fast, reliable, and visible results.
Instead of manual checklists or spending days on formatting and testing, agencies can now execute hundreds of updates across entire sites with a few clicks. For time-consuming tasks such as interlinking, alt text, and meta tags, OTTO SEO makes an immediate impact.
Manick: OTTO automates execution across categories and pages. With a complete knowledge graph, it delivers speed, scale, and strategic alignment—replacing busywork with results.
Alec: What used to take days now takes minutes. The grunt work—interlinking, metas, alt text—runs automatically, and clients see hundreds of changes right away. That kind of consistency makes it much easier to scale with the team I already have.
The benefits compound for smaller agencies, since growth no longer depends on constant hiring. Instead, automation ensures steady delivery, visible progress, and a stronger foundation for client retention from a single platform.
OTTO in Practice: Schema and Cloud Stacks
Schema and cloud stacks have always been powerful SEO tactics, yet they remain some of the hardest to scale. Manual schema creation demands hours of research, formatting, and testing, while cloud stacks typically take half a day to produce just a few links and rely on multiple external tools.
OTTO removes these barriers. Schemas that once took hours are now generated automatically with accurate entity links, passing Google validation and ensuring contextual relevance. What once required costly specialists is now delivered consistently, error-free, in minutes.
The same transformation applies to cloud stacks. What once took half a day to build a few links, OTTO now does in seconds for dozens of sites with built-in indexing.
Manick: Most schema looks fine to Google but fails the real test—semantic alignment. OTTO links to the right entities, eliminates markup errors, and even automates cloud stack indexing, making results both faster and more reliable.
Alec: Schema is expensive, and easy to break. OTTO makes it instant and removes the pain. Cloud stacks that once took half a day now take seconds, so I can finally use my team for higher-value work.
Automating Topical Maps: Smarter Content Planning
Creating a topical map is one of the most time-intensive parts of content planning. It requires outlining pillar pages, supporting topics, and internal links, a process that demands hours of research, brainstorming, and manual organization.
The topical map generator does this in seconds. It builds full site architecture, visualizes page relationships, and links supporting articles to pillars, while letting agencies control tone, structure, and linking rules.
The workload shifts from generating and organizing ideas to refining and presenting complete content strategies. For smaller teams, this levels the playing field by making it possible to win larger clients and compete at higher levels.
Manick: The topical map module automatically links every supporting article to its pillar page. With AI settings applied, you can control tone, structure, and even link logic at scale—so the maps aren’t just outlines, they’re executable strategies.
Alec: Building topical maps by hand was painful and slow. Even with a good team, it took ages to create something presentable. OTTO does it instantly, with visuals and interlinking built in. That means I can deliver enterprise-level strategy to clients who expect scale—even as a small agency.
GBP and Local SEO Automation: Posts, Q&A, Reviews, Heatmaps
Managing Google Business Profiles (GBPs) at scale has long been a time sink. Posting updates, replying to reviews, and answering user questions are all critical for visibility, but they are also repetitive and difficult to sustain across many clients.
With the Search Atlas GBP management tool, agencies can create posts, Q&A responses, and review replies in bulk, using AI prompts to generate both text and images. The Local SEO suite also generates heatmaps for target keywords and tracks performance over time, making it easy to prove improvements not only in search rankings but also in Maps visibility.
Manick: GBP module automates posts, review replies, and Q&A—what used to take days can now be done in a single session. You can queue a month of content with AI prompts, review in bulk, and schedule intelligently. It’s a full content system for GBPs.
Alec: e already had a good process in place, but this is clearly faster. Once I validate the outputs, I’ll likely switch over. It replaces work that’s tedious but important—so we can do it better and faster.
Client Communication Made Simple: Automating Reports and Summaries
Reporting is one of the most important agency workflows. Some clients expect detailed data, others prefer simplified updates, and agencies often spend hours customizing charts, writing explanations, and formatting updates.
Search Atlas streamlines this process with its report builder, letting teams connect Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console (GSC), and heatmaps.
Reports can be tailored to each client, simplified for non-technical audiences or more detailed for advanced ones, and delivery can be automated, giving every client a clear view of results.
Personalized reporting emails build loyalty, but they take time to draft and are easy to miss. AI-powered summaries now solve this problem by turning deliverables and performance data into ready-to-send updates, ensuring clients never feel ignored.
Alec: Most of my clients don’t love data, so I send them simplified reports once a month and personalized weekly emails. The report builder is great because it makes it easy to give clients evidence of results in a way they’ll actually read.
Manick: Exactly. Clients don’t want lectures, they want proof. That’s why we’re adding AI-powered summaries that consolidate deliverables and results into email-ready updates. Weekly communication builds loyalty, and now it won’t take extra time or effort.
Outreach, PR, and Future Expansion
Authority building in SEO has traditionally depended on tedious outreach, unpredictable publisher responses, and manual relationship management. These methods work, but they are slow and difficult to scale.
Search Atlas already includes link building outreach and digital PR tools, but integrating press placements into certain industries, like home services, can be challenging. The next step is a fully automated outreach module powered by OTTO that discovers relevant publishers, pitches them automatically, and aligns placements with client-specific keywords and industries.
This shift removes the bottlenecks of cold emails and manual follow-ups. As agencies grow, automation offers a way to expand domain authority without adding more staff. The future of authority building becomes not only faster, but also more predictable and scalable.
Alec: I want to use the press module more, but home services need a specific type of outlet. Still, I use the hell out of Search Atlas—and with OTTO, scaling won’t mean hiring strangers.
Manick: A new outreach module is coming. It’ll automate PR and content placement through OTTO, matching publishers to your clients based on their keyword targets.
Agency Growth and Final Reflections
Scaling an SEO agency often means choosing between expanding the team or increasing the output of the one you’ve got. Both paths create bottlenecks that limit sustainable growth.
OTTO replaces that tradeoff with consistent systems that deliver speed and accuracy across campaigns. Reporting, outreach, content, and technical execution can all be managed from one platform, producing results that once required much larger teams.
When routine execution and reporting run automatically, agencies are free to focus on strategy and deepen client trust that compounds over time.
Automation is about scaling strategy, improving outcomes, and building an agency that grows sustainably. 📈
Automation Is the Future of SEO Agencies
In this episode, you seen how automation replaces manual workflows, improves client outcomes, and frees up teams to focus on strategy instead of grunt work.
OTTO isn’t just speeding up tasks, it’s changing what’s possible. If you’re ready to build an agency that grows without bottlenecks, this is the kind of insight that changes how you operate.For more frameworks and conversations shaping the next era of SEO, subscribe to the Search Atlas YouTube channel!
