SEO
A Technical SEO Guide To Lighthouse Performance Metrics
Maybe you’re here because you’re a die-hard fan of performance metrics. Or maybe you don’t know what Lighthouse is and are too afraid to ask.
Either is an excellent option. Welcome!
Together, we’re hoping to take your performance improvement efforts from “make all the numbers green” to some clear and meaningful action items.
Note: This article was updated for freshness in January 2022 to represent versions 8 and 9.
Technical SEO and Google Data Studio nerd Rachel Anderson joined me on this merry adventure into demystifying developer documentation.
We’re going to answer:
- What is Lighthouse?
- How is Lighthouse different from Core Web Vitals?
- Why doesn’t Lighthouse match Search Console/Crux reports?
- How is Performance Score calculated?
- Why is my score different each time I test?
- Lighthouse Performance metrics explained
- How to test performance using Lighthouse
What Is Lighthouse?
Performance is about measuring how quickly a browser can assemble a webpage.
Lighthouse uses a web browser called Chromium to build pages and runs tests on the pages as they’re built. The tool is open-source (meaning it is maintained by the community and free to use).
Each audit falls into one of five categories:
- Performance.
- Accessibility.
- Best Practices.
- SEO.
- Progressive Web App.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to use the name Lighthouse to refer to the series of tests executed by the shared Github repo, regardless of the execution method.
Version 9 is currently out on Github and is slated for large-scale rollout with the stable Chrome 98 release in February 2022.
Lighthouse And Web Core Vitals
On May 5, 2020, the Chromium project announced a set of three metrics with which the Google-backed open-source browser would measure performance.
The metrics, known as Web Vitals, are part of a Google initiative designed to provide unified guidance for quality signals.
The goal of these metrics is to measure web performance in a user-centric manner.
Within two weeks, Lighthouse v6 rolled out with a modified version of Web Core Vitals at the heart of the update.
July 2020 saw Lighthouse v6’s unified metrics adopted across Google products with the release of Chrome 84.
Chrome DevTools Audits panel was renamed to Lighthouse. Pagespeed insights and Google Search Console also reference these unified metrics.
This change in focus sets new, more refined goals.
How Is Lighthouse Different Than Core Web Vitals?
The three metrics represented by Core Web Vital are part of Lighthouse performance scoring.
Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, and Cumulative Layout Shift comprise 70% of Lighthouse’s weighted performance score.
The scores you’ll see for CWV in Lighthouse are the result of emulated tests.
It’s the same metric but measured off a single page load rather than calculated from page loads around the world.
Why Doesn’t Lighthouse Match Search Console/Crux reports?
For real users, how quickly a page assembles is based on factors like their network connection, the device’s network processing power, and even the user’s physical distance to the site’s servers.
Lighthouse performance data doesn’t account for all these factors.
Instead, the tool emulates a mid-range device and throttles CPU in order to simulate the average user.
These are lab tests collected within a controlled environment with predefined device and network settings.
Lab data is helpful for debugging performance issues.
It does not mean that the experience on your local machine in a controlled environment represents the experiences of real humans in the wild.
The good news is you don’t have to choose between Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals. They’re designed to be part of the same workflow.
Always start with field data from the Chrome User Experience Report to identify issues impacting real uses.
Then leverage the expanded testing capabilities of Lighthouse to identify the code causing the issue.
If you’re working on a site pre-launch or QAing changes in a non-public environment, Lighthouse will be your new best #webperf friend.
Screenshot from Lighthouse, January 2022How Is Lighthouse Performance Metrics Calculated?
Lighthouse, January 2022In versions 8 and 9, Lighthouse’s performance score is made of seven metrics with each contributing a percentage of the total performance score.
Created by author, January 2022Why Is My Score Different Each Time I Test?
Your score may change each time you test.
Browser extensions, internet connection, A/B tests, or even the ads displayed on that specific page load have an impact.
If you’re curious/furious to know more, check out the documentation on performance testing variability.
Lighthouse Performance Metrics Explained
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- What it represents: A user’s perception of loading experience.
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 25%
- What it measures: The point in the page load timeline when the page’s largest image or text block is visible within the viewport.
- How it’s measured: Lighthouse extracts LCP data from Chrome’s tracing tool.
- Is Largest Contentful Paint a Web Core Vital? Yes!
- LCP Scoring
- Goal: Achieve LCP in < 2.5 seconds.
Created by author, January 2022What Elements Can Be Part Of LCP?
- Text.
- Images.
- Videos.
- Background images.
What Counts As LCP On Your Page?
It depends! LCP typically varies by page template.
This means that you can measure a handful of pages using the same template and define LCP.
Lighthouse will provide you with the exact HTML of the LCP element, but it can be useful to know the node as well when communicating with developers.
The node name will be consistent while the exact on-page image or text may change depending on which content is rendered by the template.
How To Define LCP Using Chrome Devtools
- Open the page in Chrome.
- Navigate to the Performance panel of Dev Tools (Command + Option + I on Mac or Control + Shift + I on Windows and Linux).
- Hover over the LCP marker in the Timings section.
- The element(s) that correspond to LCP is detailed in the Related Node field.
Created by author, January 2022What Causes Poor LCP?
Poor LCP typically comes from four issues:
- Slow server response times.
- Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.
- Resource load times.
- Client-side rendering.
How To Fix Poor LCP
If the cause is slow server response time:
- Optimize your server.
- Route users to a nearby CDN.
- Cache assets.
- Serve HTML pages cache-first.
- Establish third-party connections early.
If the cause is render-blocking JavaScript and CSS:
- Minify CSS.
- Defer non-critical CSS.
- Inline critical CSS.
- Minify and compress JavaScript files.
- Defer unused JavaScript.
- Minimize unused polyfills.
If the cause is resource load times:
- Optimize and compress images.
- Preload important resources.
- Compress text files.
- Deliver different assets based on the network connection (adaptive serving).
- Cache assets using a service worker.
If the cause is client-side rendering:
Resources For Improving LCP
Total Blocking Time (TBT)
- What it represents: Responsiveness to user input.
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 30%
- What it measures: TBT measures the time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive. TBT is the lab equivalent of First Input Delay (FID) – the field data used in the Chrome User Experience Report and Google’s upcoming Page Experience ranking signal.
- How it’s measured: The total time in which the main thread is occupied by tasks taking more than 50ms to complete. If a task takes 80ms to run, 30ms of that time will be counted toward TBT. If a task takes 45ms to run, 0ms will be added to TBT.
- Is Total Blocking Time a Web Core Vital? Yes! It’s the lab data equivalent of First Input Delay (FID).
TBT Scoring
- Goal: Achieve TBT score of less than 300 milliseconds.
Created by author, January 2022First Input Delay, the field data equivalent to TBT, has different thresholds.
Created by author, January 2022Long Tasks And Total Blocking Time
TBT measures long tasks – those taking longer than 50ms.
When a browser loads your site, there is essentially a single line queue of scripts waiting to be executed.
Any input from the user has to go into that same queue.
When the browser can’t respond to user input because other tasks are executing, the user perceives this as lag.
Essentially, long tasks are like that person at your favorite coffee shop who takes far too long to order a drink.
Like someone ordering a 2% venti four-pump vanilla, five-pump mocha whole-fat froth, long tasks are a major source of bad experiences.
Screenshot by author, January 2022What Causes A High TBT On Your Page?
Heavy JavaScript.
That’s it.
How To See TBT Using Chrome Devtools
Screenshot from Chrome Devtools, January 2022How To Fix Poor TBT
- Break up Long Tasks.
- Optimize your page for interaction readiness.
- Use a web worker.
- Reduce JavaScript execution time.
Resources For Improving TBT
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- What it represents: FCP marks the time at which the first text or image is painted (visible).
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 10%
- What it measures: The time when I can see the page I requested is responding. My thumb can stop hovering over the back button.
- How it’s measured: Your FCP score in Lighthouse is measured by comparing your page’s FCP to FCP times for real website data stored by the HTTP Archive.
- Your FCP increases if it is faster than other pages in the HTTP Archive.
- Is First Contentful Paint a Web Core Vital? No
FCP Scoring
- Goal: Achieve FCP in < 2 seconds.
Created by author, January 2022What Elements Can Be Part Of FCP?
The time it takes to render the first visible element to the DOM is the FCP.
Anything that happens before an element that renders non-white content to the page (excluding iframes) is counted toward FCP.
Since iframes are not considered part of FCP, if they are the first content to render, FCP will continue counting until the first non-iframe content loads, but the iframe load time isn’t counted toward the FCP.
The documentation around FCP also calls out that is often impacted by font load time and there are tips for improving font loads.
FCP Using Chrome Devtools
- Open the page in Chrome.
- Navigate to the Performance panel of Dev Tools (Command + Option + I on Mac or Control + Shift + I on Windows and Linux).
- Click on the FCP marker in the Timings section.
- The summary tab has a timestamp with the FCP in ms.
How To Improve FCP
In order for content to be displayed to the user, the browser must first download, parse, and process all external stylesheets it encounters before it can display or render any content to a user’s screen.
The fastest way to bypass the delay of external resources is to use in-line styles for above-the-fold content.
To keep your site sustainably scalable, use an automated tool like penthouse and Apache’s mod_pagespeed.
These solutions will come with some restrictions to functionalities, require testing, and may not be for everyone.
Universally, we can all improve our site’s time to First Contentful Paint by reducing the scope and complexity of style calculations.
If a style isn’t being used, remove it.
You can identify unused CSS with Chrome Dev Tool’s built-in Code Coverage functionality.
Use better data to make better decisions.
Similar to TTI, you can capture real user metrics for FCP using Google Analytics to correlate improvements with KPIs.
Resources For Improving FCP
Speed Index
- What it represents: How much is visible at a time during load.
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 10%
- What it measures: The Speed Index is the average time at which visible parts of the page are displayed.
- How it’s measured: Lighthouse’s Speed Index measurement comes from a node module called Speedline.
You’ll have to ask the kindly wizards at webpagetest.org for the specifics but roughly, Speedline scores vary by the size of the viewport (read as device screen) and have an algorithm for calculating the completeness of each frame.
Screenshot by author, January 2022- Is Speed Index a Web Core Vital? No.
SI Scoring
- Goal: achieve SI in < 4.3 seconds.
Created by author, January 2022How To Improve SI
Speed score reflects your site’s Critical Rendering Path.
A “critical” resource means that the resource is required for the first paint or is crucial to the page’s core functionality.
The longer and denser the path, the slower your site will be to provide a visual page.
If your path is optimized, you’ll give users content faster and score higher on Speed Index.
How The Critical Path Affects Rendering
Screenshot by author, January 2022Lighthouse recommendations commonly associated with a slow Critical Rendering Path include:
- Minimize main-thread work.
- Reduce JavaScript execution time.
- Minimize Critical Requests Depth.
- Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources.
- Defer offscreen images.
Resources For Improving SI
Time To Interactive
- What it represents: Load responsiveness; identifying where a page looks responsive but isn’t yet.
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 10%
- What it measures: The time from when the page begins loading to when its main resources have loaded and are able to respond to user input.
- How it’s measured: TTI measures how long it takes a page to become fully interactive. A page is considered fully interactive when:
1. The page displays useful content, which is measured by the First Contentful Paint.
2. Event handlers are registered for most visible page elements.
3. The page responds to user interactions within 50 milliseconds.
- Is Time to Interactive a Web Core Vital? No
TTI Scoring
Goal: achieve TTI score of less than 3.8 seconds.
Created by author, January 2022Resources For Improving TTI
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- What it represents: A user’s perception of a page’s visual stability.
- Lighthouse Performance score weighting: 15%
- What it measures: It quantifies shifting page elements through the end of page load.
- How it’s measured: Unlike other metrics, CLS isn’t measured in time. Instead, it’s a calculated metric based on the number of frames in which elements move and the total distance in pixels the elements moved.
Created by author, January 2022CLS Scoring
- Goal: achieve CLS score of less than 0.1.
Created by author, January 2022What Elements Can Be Part Of CLS?
Any visual element that appears above the fold at some point in the load.
That’s right – if you’re loading your footer first and then the hero content of the page, your CLS is going to hurt.
Causes Of Poor CLS
- Images without dimensions.
- Ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions.
- Dynamically injected content.
- Web Fonts causing FOIT/FOUT.
- Actions waiting for a network response before updating DOM.
How To Define CLS Using Chrome Devtools
- Open the page in Chrome.
- Navigate to the Performance panel of Dev Tools (Command + Option + I on Mac or Control + Shift + I on Windows and Linux).
- Hover and move from left to right over the screenshots of the load (make sure the screenshots checkbox is checked).
- Watch for elements bouncing around after the first paint to identify elements causing CLS.
How To Improve CLS
Once you identify the element(s) at fault, you’ll need to update them to be stable during the page load.
For example, if slow-loading ads are causing the high CLS score, you may want to use placeholder images of the same size to fill that space as the ad loads to prevent the page shifting.
Some common ways to improve CLS include:
- Always include width and height size attributes on images and video elements.
- Reserve space for ad slots (and don’t collapse it).
- Avoid inserting new content above existing content.
- Take care when placing non-sticky ads near the top of the viewport.
- Preload fonts.
CLS Resources
How To Test Performance Using Lighthouse
Methodology Matters
Out of the box, Lighthouse audits a single page at a time.
A single page score doesn’t represent your site, and a fast homepage doesn’t mean a fast site.
Test multiple page types within your site.
Identify your major page types, templates, and goal conversion points (signup, subscribe, and checkout pages).
If 40% of your site is blog posts, make 40% of your testing URLs blog pages!
Example Page Testing Inventory
Created by author, January 2022Before you begin optimizing, run Lighthouse on each of your sample pages and save the report data.
Record your scores and the to-do list of improvements.
Prevent data loss by saving the JSON results and utilizing Lighthouse Viewer when detailed result information is needed.
Get Your Backlog to Bite Back Using ROI
Getting development resources to action SEO recommendations is hard.
An in-house SEO professional could destroy their pancreas by having a birthday cake for every backlogged ticket’s birthday. Or at least learn to hate cake.
In my experience as an in-house enterprise SEO pro, the trick to getting performance initiatives prioritized is having the numbers to back the investment.
This starting data will become dollar signs that serve to justify and reward development efforts.
With Lighthouse testing, you can recommend specific and direct changes (Think preload this font file) and associate the change to a specific metric.
Chances are you’re going to have more than one area flagged during tests. That’s okay!
If you’re wondering which changes will have the most bang for the buck, check out the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator.
How To Run Lighthouse Tests
This is a case of many roads leading to Oz.
Sure, some scarecrow might be particularly loud about a certain shade of brick but it’s about your goals.
Looking to test an entire staging site? Time to learn some NPM.
Have less than five minutes to prep for a prospective client meeting? A couple of one-off reports should do the trick.
Whichever way you execute, default to mobile unless you have a special use-case for desktop.
For One-Off Reports: PageSpeed Insights
Test one page at a time on PageSpeed Insights. Simply enter the URL.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, January 2022Pros Of Running Lighthouse From PageSpeed Insights
- Detailed Lighthouse report is combined with URL-specific data from the Chrome User Experience Report.
- Opportunities and Diagnostics can be filtered to specific metrics. This is exceptionally useful when creating tickets for your engineers and tracking the resulting impact of the changes.
- PageSpeed Insights is running already version 9.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, January 2022
Cons Of Running Lighthouse From PageSpeed Insights
- One report at a time.
- Only Performance tests are run (if you need SEO, Accessibility, or Best Practices, you’ll need to run those separately)
- You can’t test local builds or authenticated pages.
- Reports can’t be saved in JSON, HTML, or Gist format. (Save as PDF via browser functionality is an option.
- Requires you to manually save results.
For Comparing Test Results: Chrome DevTools Or Web.dev
Because the report will be emulating a user’s experience using your browser, use an incognito instance with all extensions, and the browser’s cache disabled.
Pro-tip: Create a Chrome profile for testing. Keep it local (no sync enabled, password saving, or association to an existing Google account) and don’t install extensions for the user.
How To Run A Test Lighthouse Using Chrome DevTools
- Open an incognito instance of Chrome.
- Navigate to the Network panel of Chrome Dev Tools (Command + Option + I on Mac or Control + Shift + I on Windows and Linux).
- Tick the box to disable cache.
- Navigate to the Lighthouse panel.
- Click Generate Report.
- Click the dots to the right of the URL in the report
- Save in your preferred format (JSON, HTML, or Gist)
Screenshot from Lighthouse Reports, January 2022
Note that your version of Lighthouse may change depending on what version of Chrome you’re using. v8.5 is used on Chrome 97.
Lighthouse v9 will ship with DevTools in Chrome 98.
How To Run A Test Lighthouse Using Web.Dev
It’s just like DevTools but you don’t have to remember to disable all those pesky extensions!
- Go to web.dev/measure.
- Enter your URL.
- Click Run Audit.
- Click View Report.
Screenshot by author, January 2022
Pros Of Running Lighthouse From DevTools/web.dev
- You can test local builds or authenticated pages.
- Saved reports can be compared using the Lighthouse CI Diff tool.
Screenshot from Lighthouse CI Diff, January 2022
Cons Of Running Lighthouse From DevTools/web.dev
- One report at a time.
- Requires you to manually save results.
For Testing At Scale (and Sanity): Node Command Line
1. Install npm.
(Mac Pro-tip: Use homebrew to avoid obnoxious dependency issues.)
2. Install the Lighthouse node module with npm
install -g lighthouse
3. Run a single text with
lighthouse <url>
4. Run tests on lists of usings by running tests programmatically.
Pros Of Running Lighthouse From Node
- Many reports can be run at once.
- Can be set to run automatically to track change over time.
Cons Of Running Lighthouse From Node
- Requires some coding knowledge.
- More time-intensive setup.
Conclusion
The complexity of performance metrics reflects the challenges facing all sites.
We use performance metrics as a proxy for user experience – that means factoring in some unicorns.
Tools like Google’s Test My Site and What Does My Site Cost? can help you make the conversion and customer-focused arguments for why performance matters.
Hopefully, once your project has traction, these definitions will help you translate Lighthouse’s single performance metric into action tickets for a skilled and collaborative engineering team.
Track your data and shout it from the rooftops.
As much as Google struggles to quantify qualitative experiences, SEO professionals and devs must decode how to translate a concept into code.
Test, iterate, and share what you learn! I look forward to seeing what you’re capable of, you beautiful unicorn.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
OpenAI Claims New “o1” Model Can Reason Like A Human
OpenAI has unveiled its latest language model, “o1,” touting advancements in complex reasoning capabilities.
In an announcement, the company claimed its new o1 model can match human performance on math, programming, and scientific knowledge tests.
However, the true impact remains speculative.
Extraordinary Claims
According to OpenAI, o1 can score in the 89th percentile on competitive programming challenges hosted by Codeforces.
The company insists its model can perform at a level that would place it among the top 500 students nationally on the elite American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME).
Further, OpenAI states that o1 exceeds the average performance of human subject matter experts holding PhD credentials on a combined physics, chemistry, and biology benchmark exam.
These are extraordinary claims, and it’s important to remain skeptical until we see open scrutiny and real-world testing.
Reinforcement Learning
The purported breakthrough is o1’s reinforcement learning process, designed to teach the model to break down complex problems using an approach called the “chain of thought.”
By simulating human-like step-by-step logic, correcting mistakes, and adjusting strategies before outputting a final answer, OpenAI contends that o1 has developed superior reasoning skills compared to standard language models.
Implications
It’s unclear how o1’s claimed reasoning could enhance understanding of queries—or generation of responses—across math, coding, science, and other technical topics.
From an SEO perspective, anything that improves content interpretation and the ability to answer queries directly could be impactful. However, it’s wise to be cautious until we see objective third-party testing.
OpenAI must move beyond benchmark browbeating and provide objective, reproducible evidence to support its claims. Adding o1’s capabilities to ChatGPT in planned real-world pilots should help showcase realistic use cases.
Featured Image: JarTee/Shutterstock
SEO
How to Build a Fandom by Talent-Scouting Great Content
At a time when anyone can create content, the real challenge—and opportunity—is in saying something new.
I think content curation can help with that.
Curation is all about finding undiscovered stories and repackaging ideas in ways your audience really respond to.
In this article, you’ll learn why content curation is great for growth, and how to talent scout quality underground or left-field content.
Gathering and sharing content is a popular social media tactic, but content curation extends to mediums and channels far beyond social.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
| Example | Type | What is it? |
|---|---|---|
| The Pudding | Article | A data journalism publication that curates a range of rich media (e.g. social comments, headline snippets, literature reviews) to tell compelling visual stories – like this one. |
| Ahrefs’ digest | Newsletter | Our Senior Content Marketing Manager, Si Quan Ong (SQ), curates key SEO/marketing news, accompanied by snappy annotations. |
| Near Media Memo | Podcast | Conversations at the intersection of search, social, and commerce. Hosts curate and discuss the latest industry content. |
| KFC’s “Bucket Bangers” Spotify Playlist | Playlist | A playlist curated by KFC as part of a PR campaign, containing 46 tracks that name drop the brand. |
| Campaign Inspiration | Image carousel | This LinkedIn page curates visual examples of existing PR campaigns to inspire marketers. |
Newsletters, in particular, have become the go-to platform for curation, since they’re fairly cheap to run and easy to set up.
The numbers back this up. A quick look at Site Explorer shows newsletter platform Substack experiencing a 373% leap in organic traffic from September 5th, 2023 to September 5th, 2024.
You can see some great examples of curated SEO newsletters here: I Subscribed to 72 SEO Newsletters. Here Are My 11 Favorites.
Now you know about content curation in all its forms and guises, let me tell you what’s so great about it…
From saving money, to building traffic, and cementing your authority, content curation comes with plenty of benefits.
1. Content curation saves time and money
At Ahrefs, we follow The Pareto Principle: the idea that 80% of the reward comes from 20% of the effort.
If you want to improve your effort:reward ratio, curation is a great option.
I asked SQ about the benefits of content curation, and he had this to say:
“One benefit is that I don’t have to write an essay from scratch each week (which is what most newsletters are).”
While content curation has the potential to save you time, resources, and money, I do want to add two important caveats:
- Curating niche, underground content examples can still take time – especially when you’re first finding your sources.
- If you’re doing deep-dive investigations into those examples, you may spend just as long curating as you would creating.
2. Curation helps you build links, traffic, and engagement
Marketing Examples is a goldmine of curated marketing snippets.
Founder, Harry Dry, doesn’t just gather content — he dissects real-world marketing copy, name drops the creator, and breaks down their winning formulas, making it easy for readers to replicate that success.
As a result, his site has earned fairly consistent links and traffic over time, growing organically by 88% in the last two years.
Curating content is an example of what I call “awareness you prepared earlier”. Your chances of driving traction are vastly improved when you crowdsource ideas.
Not only do your audience consume your curated content, they publicize it to their own network via social posts or reciprocal links when they get featured.
Some refer to this as “ego bait”. Obviously there’s an element of flattery involved, but in my experience, the top curators prioritize content that genuinely helped or inspired them, rather than chasing big names with the widest reach.
3. Curating content is great for EEAT
Few people have direct experience with every topic they’ve ever written about.
But, since 2022, first-hand experience has become a prerequisite for ranking in Google.
Curating others’ lived experiences and knowledge in your content is a powerful way to build your EEAT and improve your rankings.
4. You become credible by association
We tend to categorize people according to their social group memberships – this is known as social categorization.
If you’re regularly associating yourself with respected thought leaders, your audience is more likely to group you with them, and hold you in higher regard as a result.
Mixing in your own content and opinion is important for building credibility, but be careful not to overdo the self-promotion.
Back to SQ:
“I don’t tend to include all of the blog posts we publish on our blog.“
5. You get closer to your customers and community
When you curate, you consume content holistically –like your customers– and stop being so introspective.
If you’re only consuming content from your brand or brand “friends”, there’s a limit to the value you can bring to your audience.
Content curators turn to their community to source content, so curating bridges the gap in two ways: by helping them consume like their customers, and by giving them a reason to connect.
6. When you curate, your content gets better
To create is to curate. All ideas are shaped and borrowed from somewhere – that’s how knowledge is acquired.
If I don’t curate, I tend to find my own content stagnates.
Curation introduces me to new ideas, reminds me of the things I have forgotten, allows me to build deeper, more informed arguments, and ultimately helps me produce better content – with a lot more in the way of information gain.
For instance, this blog started out as a simple list of content curation benefits, thunk up by yours truly.
But as I came across cool examples of novel content curation, it evolved into a more comprehensive (and hopefully, more interesting) guide.
“Another benefit of content curation is that I get to keep abreast of anything new in SEO and marketing, which informs my own work”
7. You build your personal “brand”
Curation gives you the chance to platform your own expertise and assert yourself as a thought leader.
Take a look at the search volume for one of the most prolific curators in SEO: Aleyda Solis.
Aleyda curates SEO news and insights across her newsletter, SEOFOMO, her podcast, Crawling Mondays, her owned social media channels, and industry talks.
As a result, her name now drives ~600 monthly organic searches, according to Site Explorer.
And over 19K “in content” mentions, according to Content Explorer.
Curation is about piecing together unrelated content to reveal new ideas and information.
You’re giving someone else’s content another shot at engagement – sometimes after a “failure” to launch.
“The same core information can be made more or less valuable by changing its format. Great ideas are sometimes locked away in places that render them inaccessible to people that would benefit from them.”
Here are 9 ways you can “talent scout” novel content, and carve out your own curation USP.
1. Pay attention to lesser-known voices
In every industry there are sources that audiences defer to for information and ideas.
Look beyond them.
Scout for “rising stars” and underground sources to give your curation exclusivity.
Mark Williams-Cook, Director at Candour and Founder of AlsoAsked, does just this when curating his newsletter: Core Updates.
“I’ve made a conscious effort not just to follow the ‘big names’, as there are some truly excellent SEOs that are very quiet on social media. I’d always recommend following someone if you see them putting out solid advice, even if you’ve never heard of them. I’ve made some good friends and excellent connections that way!”
This is probably something you’ll have to do manually at first.
I try to pay close attention to people leaving savvy comments on social media posts and industry communities.
2. Build an X list of “ones to watch”
Once you’ve found the right “ones to watch”, you can start building a list to refer back to whenever it’s time to curate.
SQ uses X lists and subscribes to others’ Substacks:
“I have my own Twitter list of marketers (getting poorer these days sadly) and follow other people’s substacks/newsletters and see if there are any links they recommend.”
3. Mine niche and atypical sources of information
Nicole DeLeon, Ed Zitron, Marie Haynes and other tech curators recently mined Google’s DoJ trial documentation to investigate “buried” information on how the search engine ranks content.
Search Engine Roundtable founder, Barry Schwartz, is always extracting content from Google rep social comments, Google developer docs, and Google’s Office Hours video series to curate hot-off-the-press news.
Techemails mines leaked tech company emails from court filings and curates them across social media and their website (p.s. they are preeetty eye-opening).
Finding and teasing out obscure information is a great skill to have when it comes to content curation.
Here are some more ways you can do that:
- Track updates in company documentation (e.g. brand Ts & Cs, Google Developer Docs, Anthropic Release Notes)
- Mine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request databases
- Monitor government data via fact finding bodies (e.g. Indeed curates content from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to inform content in their Hiring Lab)
- Study public datasets released by research institutions (e.g. Harvard Dataverse)
- Mine “hidden” or ephemeral content (e.g. podcasts, webinars, industry talks, seminars etc.) to curate quotes and promote relatively unheard information
- Monitor public announcements and press releases from organizations
4. Track down new and trending content
Be the first to break and curate news in your industry. Start by searching for industry-specific keywords in Content Explorer.
Then add filters to make sure you’re seeing the freshest and highest quality content.
In my experience, I find that:
- Adding a minimum Referring Domain of “30”
- Adding a minimum word count of “300”
- Sorting by “Date: newest first”
…shows me the newest and best SEO related content, but you should play around until you find what works in your industry.
Tip
When it comes to filtering, don’t get too prescriptive about it – remember, you want to find novel content that usually flies under the radar, so avoid being overly strict with minimum thresholds.
This next part is really important. Once you’re happy with your configuration, hit “Save filters” so that you can repeat this analysis for the next instalment of your newsletter, podcast, social post, article, or whatever else you might be curating.
With the Content Explorer, you’re searching for instances of a keyword in the title, content, URL or all of the above.
But relevant content won’t always contain the exact keywords or topics you’re searching for.
In which case, try searching for keywords in the anchor text linking to that content.
There’s a preconfigured search for this in Ahrefs’ Web Explorer. Just hit the “examples” tab, and select “Most quoted newly published pages about ChatGPT”:
This will load a full report of the most linked to pages about the topic “ChatGPT” over the last week. Then all you need to do is update the report with your chosen topic, and adjust any filters.
And hit “Save report”.
Another tip for breaking news was recently disclosed by SEO expert and founder of SEO blog Detailed, Glen Allsopp, on the Ahrefs Podcast (it’s a great episode – I highly recommend a full listen!)
He spoke about a technique that he refers to as the “iPhone Link Building” method.
“The reason I call it this, because it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how old your website is, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around. If you have a photo of the iPhone 16 before anyone else and you put that on [your site], the whole tech world is going to talk about it, right? You’re going to get links from every tech website on the planet. Doesn’t matter that [your site] has nothing to do with tech and gadgets. You’ve got the first iPhone link. People are going to talk about it. So I refer to it as the iPhone link building.“
To carry out “iPhone link building”, Glen sets up an alert using Visual Ping. This sends him a notification as soon as there’s an update on one of the webpages he’s tracking. If something new or interesting has changed, he’ll work this into his next piece of content.
5. Ask your network
Turning to your social network for examples of existing content is a great way to curate.
Here’s Chris Haines, Ahrefs’ Senior SEO Specialist, doing just this on LinkedIn…
And here I am posting in Women In Tech SEO (my #1 community) for contributions to my article: So You’ve Been Asked To Humanize AI Content
Often, Slack communities will dedicate a channel to self-promotion. This is another handy way to find new content to curate.
“In the Women in Tech SEO Slack group, we have a hashtag channel (#wts-amplify-me) that serves as a space for members to promote their work, and it’s wholesome to see lots of our members use it to highlight the work of others! This channel helps me curate content for our weekly WTSNewsletter. As newsletter creators, we are responsible for amplifying diverse voices, which was the driving force behind starting WTSNewsletter. The lack of diversity in industry newsletters motivated me to create our very own weekly newsletter that showcases the brilliant work of underrepresented individuals.”
Community content sourcing doesn’t begin and end with LinkedIn or Slack. Check out other pockets of the internet, including niche forums, Subreddits, Facebook groups, and Mastodon instances.
6. Bookmark everything
Some of my best articles have been inspired by the posts I’ve bookmarked.
Here are my top tips for bookmarking curated content:
Use web highlighters
Use a web highlighter plugin to bookmark interesting content for future curation.
Organize examples in a note taking app
Use a note taking app like Notion or Obsidian to organize your content examples.
Bookmark your saved social media content
You’ll undoubtedly have banked some great content on social media over the years, but navigating back to those archives can be a bit of a faff.
I bookmark mine to my browser so I can easily jump back in (e.g. LinkedIn “Saved”, X bookmarks, X advanced searches, TikTok saved, Instagram saved etc.)
7. Set up author notifications
Follow creators and journalists that inspire you. Subscribe to their channel, turn on notification bells on LinkedIn and X, and set up RSS feeds to get alerted whenever they push out new content.
Tip
When you’re searching for new content in the Content Explorer, check out the Authors tab for ideas on which thought leaders to follow in your industry.
8. Set up keyword alerts
Get notified as soon as on-topic content is published, with Ahrefs “Mention” alerts.
9. Use AI to extract and annotate content
AI broadly summarizes outdated content, and has a habit of forgoing (or entirely fabricating) references. In other words, it’s pretty terrible for curating unique content.
Instead, use it to extract, summarize, and investigate the content you’ve selectively curated.
Extract nuggets from “hidden” content
I used AI to extract quotes and insights from webinars, interviews, and YouTube videos. The post I wrote for SpinSucks was inspired by content mined from interview transcripts and bookmarked social media content, using Claude AI.
Reverse-engineer successful content formulas
I fed ChatGPT examples of top-performing blogs to understand patterns of success, and inform my opinion of what “good” content looks like, while updating the post: 6 Simple Blog Post Templates (Download & Edit Along.
We’ve covered a lot of ground, but there are a few extra details worth mentioning before you jump into curation.
Make sure you have a clear theme
Curation isn’t just about sourcing and presenting the most unique content you can find.
Value also comes from carefully selecting content that fits a central concept or theme.
“[Content curation] helps build my taste, which in my opinion, is the hardest part of curation, because most people don’t seem to understand the concept of “curation”, i.e. selecting the best, or what fits a theme. They just seem to shoehorn every article on the internet.”
Build your exclude list
Be discerning about the content you create. Set out rules as to the content or people you will/won’t include, using your brand guidelines for inspiration.
Repurpose your knowledge
Content curation is usually cheaper and easier to produce, but don’t treat it as a “one and done” activity. Repurpose the things you learn both internally and externally.
“We actually use the news – that Jack (Chambers-Ward) and I curate for the Core Updates newsletter – internally at Candour during one of our weekly meetings when we are discussing changes in the industry. So it’s been a helpful task to make sure the agency is always up to date!”
Final thoughts
Content curation isn’t a “set it and forget it” tactic. It’s an ongoing process that demands a reasonable amount of effort, but the payoff is worth it. That’s because:
- It’s a traffic magnet: Curated content can outperform original content in terms of organic traffic, because you’re cherry-picking the best ideas.
- It builds your E-E-A-T: By sharing valuable experiences, you’re signaling to users and search engines that you know your stuff. This can boost your rankings across the board.
- It’s a networking opportunity: When you share others’ content, they notice. We’ve built relationships with industry giants simply by featuring their work on our blog or weekly digest.
Great curation is about adding value. You can just reshare content verbatim, but you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to add your own insight, and explain why the content you’ve painstakingly curated matters to your audience.
In a world where 70 million blog posts are published every month, skilled curators stand out. They don’t just share content – they build communities, spark discussions, and become go-to resources in their niches.
If you’re giving content curation a try, experiment with different formats and track what resonates (our Content Explorer can help with that too), then watch your influence grow.
SEO
Stop Overcomplicating Things. Entity SEO is Just SEO
“Entity SEO”.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Not only does the word “entity” sound foreign, it feels like yet another thing to add to your never-ending SEO to-do list. You’re barely afloat when it comes to SEO, but ohgawd here comes one more new thing to dedicate your scarce resources.
I have good news for you though: You don’t have to do entity SEO.
Why? Because you’re probably already doing it.
Let’s start from the beginning.
In 2012, Google announced the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them.
An entity is any object or concept that can be distinctly identified. This includes tangibles like people, places, and organizations, and intangibles like colors, concepts, and feelings.
For example, the footballer Federico Chiesa is an entity:
So is the famous British-Indian restaurant Dishoom:
Entities are connected by edges, which describe the relationships between them.
Introducing the Knowledge Graph helped improve Google’s search results because:
- Google could better understand search intent — People search for the same thing but describe it in different ways. Google can now understand this and serve the same results.
- It reduced reliance on keyword matching — Matching the number of keywords on a page doesn’t guarantee relevance; also it prevents crafty SEOs from keyword stuffing.
- It reduced Google’s computational load — The Internet is virtually infinite and Google simply cannot understand the meaning of every word, paragraph, webpage, and website. Entities provide a structure where Google can improve understanding while minimizing load.
For example, even though we didn’t mention the actor’s name, Google can understand we’re looking for Harrison Ford and therefore shows his filmography:
That’s because Hans Solo and Harrison Ford are closely connected entities in the Knowledge Graph. Google shows Knowledge Graph data in SERP features like Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Cards.
With this knowledge, we can then define entity SEO as optimizing your website or webpages for such entities.
If Google has moved to entity-oriented search, then entity SEO is just SEO. As my colleague Patrick Stox says, “The entity identification part is more on Google’s end than on our end.”
I mean, if you look at the ‘entity SEO’ tactics you find in blog posts, you’ll discover that they’re mostly just SEO tactics:
- Earn a Wikipedia page
- Create a Google Business Profile
- Add internal links
- Create all digital assets Google is representing on the page (e.g., videos, images, Twitter)
- Develop topical authority
- Include semantically related words on a page
- Add schema markup
Let’s be honest. If you’re serious about SEO and are investing in it, then it’s likely you’re already doing most of the above.
Regardless of entities, wouldn’t you want a Wikipedia page? After all, it confers benefits beyond “entity SEO”. Brand recognition, backlinks from one of the world’s most authoritative sites (albeit nofollow)—any company would want that.
If you’re a local business, you’ve probably created a Google Business Profile. Adding internal links is just SEO 101.
And billions of blistering barnacles, creating all digital assets Google wants to see, like images and videos, is practically marketing 101. If you’re a Korean recipe site and want to be associated with the kimchi jjigae entity, wouldn’t you already know you need to make a video and have photos of the cooking process?
When I started my breakdance site years ago, I knew nothing about SEO and content marketing but I still knew I needed to make YouTube videos. Because guess what? It’s hard to learn breakdancing from words. I don’t think I needed an entity SEO to tell me that.
Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website aims to become the go-to authority on one or more topics. Call me crazy, but it feels like blogging 101. Read most guides on how to start a blog and I’m sure you’ll find a subheading called “niche down”. And once you niche down, it’s inevitable you’ll create content surrounding that one topic.
If I start a breakdance site, what are the chances I’ll write about contemporary dance or pop art? Pretty low.
In fact, topical authority is similar to the Wiki Strategy, which Nat Eliason wrote about in 2017. There wasn’t a single mention of entities. It was just the right way to make content for the Internet.
I think the biggest problem here isn’t entities versus keywords or that topical authority is a brand-new strategy. It’s simply that many SEOs are driven by short-sightedness or the wrong incentives.
You can target a whole bunch of unrelated keywords that have high search volume, gain incredible amounts of search traffic, and brag about how successful you are as an SEO.
Some of the pages sending HubSpot the most search traffic has barely anything to do with their core product. A page on how to type the shrug emoji? The most famous quotes?
This is not to single out HubSpot—I’m sure they have their reasons, as explored by Ryan here—but to illustrate that many companies do the exact same thing. And when Google stops rewarding this behavior, all of a sudden companies realise they do need to write about their core competencies. They need to “build topical authority”.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater because I do see value in the last two ‘entity SEO tactics’. But again, if you’re doing something similar to the Wiki Strategy for your site, chances are you would have naturally included entities or semantically relevant words without thinking too much about it. It’s difficult to create content about kimchi jjigae without mentioning kimchi, pork, or gochujang.
However, to prevent the curse of knowledge or simply to avoid blindspots, checking for important subtopics you might have missed is useful. At Ahrefs, we run a page-level content gap analysis and look out for subtopics:
For example, if we ran a content gap analysis on “inbound marketing” for the top three ranking pages, we see that we might need to include these subtopics:
- What is inbound marketing
- Inbound marketing strategy
- Inbound marketing examples
- Inbound marketing tools
Finally, adding schema markup makes the most sense because it’s how Google recognizes entities and better understands the content of web pages. But if it’s just one new tactic—which I believe is already part of ‘standard’ SEO and you might already be doing it—then there’s no need to create a category to define the “new era” (voice SEO, where art thou?)
Final thoughts
Two years ago, someone on Reddit asked for an SEO workflow that utilized super advanced SEO methodologies:
The top answer: None of the above.
When our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo tweeted about this Reddit thread, he got similar replies too:
And even though I don’t know him, this is a person after my own heart:
You don’t have to worry about entity SEO. If you have passion for a topic and are creating high-quality content that fulfills what people are looking for, then you’re likely already doing “entity SEO”.
Just follow this meme: Make stuff people like.
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