  We review and extend recent studies of dilaton effective field theory (dEFT)
which provide a framework for the description of the Higgs boson as a composite
structure. We first describe the dEFT as applied to lattice data for a class of
gauge theories with near-conformal infrared behavior. It includes the dilaton
associated with the spontaneous breaking of (approximate) scale invariance, and
a set of pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons (pNGBs) associated with the spontaneous
breaking of an (approximate) internal global symmetry. The theory contains two
small symmetry-breaking parameters. We display the leading-order (LO)
Lagrangian, and review its fit to lattice data for the $SU(3)$ gauge theory
with $N_f = 8$ Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. We then
develop power-counting rules to identify the corrections emerging at
next-to-leading order (NLO) in the dEFT action. We list the NLO operators that
appear and provide estimates for the coefficients. We comment on implications
for composite-Higgs model building.
