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I am currently working on improving my sites SEO score by identifying to Google which pages are canonical, and based on my research and feedback the best and easiest way is to expand our sitemap.xml page (We currently have a smaller site). I have ran the lighthouse chrome extension on our live website and received a score of 82. I then on my local instance add 5 links to our sitemap and expect this SEO score to improve, but after spinning up my server and navigating to local host the SEO score still comes back at 82.

Is this expected, i.e. does the lighthouse score not take into account canonical pages when giving back a score? And if so is there a way I can demonstrate SEO improvement while keeping the changes local?

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    I thought that lighthouse tested pages, not sites. Why would you expect the score to change based on the sitemap? Why would it need to know about canonical URLs?
    – Stephen Ostermiller on Strike ♦
    May 6, 2022 at 17:32

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I am currently working on improving my sites SEO score

Before going into detail, please note that the SEO Score in Lighthouse has very little to do with how Google is ranking websites. You can be very successful in SEO with a bad SEO score in Lighthouse. And you can have a good SEO score in Lighthouse without seeing any SEO traffic. It is really just a very basic check that is far from complete.

based on my research and feedback the best and easiest way is to expand our sitemap.xml page (We currently have a smaller site)

I am not sure what you mean here. Your sitemap should contain all your URLs. What do you mean by expanding it? What links did you add? Was your sitemapnot containing all of your URLs previously?

Is this expected, i.e. does the lighthouse score not take into account canonical pages when giving back a score?

The SEO score in Lighthouse for a URL(!) should not change when you are making changes to your sitemap. The important part here, is that Lighthouse is always evaluating only one URL/page - not the whole website.

And if so is there a way I can demonstrate SEO improvement while keeping the changes local?

If you mean SEO improvements that actually have a positive impact on your rankings in Google, then the Lighthouse SEO score is not suitable anyways. See Lighthouse as an audit that you can run to identify possible issues - not as scoring system that can actually predict your SEO success.

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