If you follow the most followed sources (big players of the SEO niche), your efforts will be average, because everyone else is doing the same thing.
By the time the “popular” sources publish their seo/case studies/experiments, those techniques are diluted.
Find alternative tools to use and wield them for success.
I’m not going to mention the tools I use because they keep me ahead of everyone else. In addition, I coded my own crawler, and use it and some API’s to evaluate competitor sites.
You really need to take it to the next level on your own and not rely on what the most popular source of SEO information is.