Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial component of digital marketing. Lighthouse, a Google-developed open-source tool, is commonly used to evaluate website performance and identify areas that need improvement. Many thought that when Google released Lighthouse, there would no longer be a need for SEO specialists and additional efforts outside of getting a good Lighthouse score. Little did they know that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Lighthouse generates a score ranging from 0 to 100 based on several criteria, including accessibility, performance, best practices, and SEO. Typically when you are building a website, you want to aim to have a score of 100 in each of these categories, however, “a high Lighthouse SEO score doesn’t mean a site will have good organic rankings.” (Practical Commerce)
Quality Matters
Lighthouse focuses on technical SEO factors that do not necessarily reflect the quality of a website's content. Technical SEO optimizes the technical aspects of a site to increase SEO, such as page loading times, meta tags, and how easy a site is to crawl (Big Commerce). While technical SEO is essential, it is not the only factor that influences SEO. The quality of content is also a crucial factor that search engines use to determine a website's relevance to a user's search query. Even if a website has a perfect Lighthouse SEO score, it may not rank well in search engine results if its content is poor or irrelevant to users' search queries.
For example, keywords play a crucial role in SEO. Keywords are the words or phrases that users type into search engines to find relevant information. You may have a score of 100 for your Lighthouse SEO, but if you are using keywords that aren’t relevant to your audience, you may never reach them. Lighthouse does not account for the competitiveness of keywords that a website is targeting. Some keywords are more competitive than others, meaning that many other websites are targeting them, making it harder for a website to rank for them. While a website may have a perfect Lighthouse SEO score, it may struggle to rank well for highly competitive keywords, even with strong content and off-page SEO.
External Factors
Another limitation of Lighthouse is that it does not take into account off-page SEO factors, such as backlinks and social signals. Off-page SEO refers to the measures taken outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings. Backlinks, for instance, are links from other websites to a particular website, which signal to search engines that the website is a reliable and authoritative source of information. Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, also indicate that a website's content is valuable and relevant to users. A website with a perfect Lighthouse SEO score may still struggle to rank well if it lacks strong off-page SEO factors.
You can improve your backlinks to your site by posting references to your site on social media platforms, linking to your site from your company's LinkedIn page, and seeking partnerships with other sites to get them to put links to your site on theirs (for example: maybe through writing a blog piece for them as an industry expert). Sites such as helpareporter.com can be a great source for offering up your expertise.
Performance & UX Matter
Another issue with relying solely on Lighthouse for SEO evaluation is that it does not consider user experience factors. User experience (UX) refers to the overall experience that users have when interacting with a website. UX includes factors such as website design, ease of navigation, and page load speed. A website may have a perfect Lighthouse SEO score but still provide a poor user experience, leading to high bounce rates and low conversion rates.
One immediate tool you can use is the Lighthouse Performance score. Since site performance is typically influenced almost entirely by technical elements that Lighthouse is able to monitor, using this score and applying the proper changes accordingly is a great way to get your site looking professional and fast quickly.
Verdict
Lighthouse is an excellent tool to help direct your SEO efforts. It provides you with key information crucial to know whether or not Google and other search engines will rank your site properly. However, there are some serious limitations in regard to the feedback and information that it can give you as to the quality of your SEO efforts. While getting a score of 100 is excellent, it cannot replace the additional efforts needed for effective SEO such as backlinks, content creation, keyword optimization, etc.