--- title: "How I Understand Problems: an SEO Diagnosis" description: "Breaking down a traffic decline through search data, content performance, and market shifts, then turning the findings into SEO and content strategy." url: https://dasto.app/portfolio/en/problem/ language: en alternate_zh: https://dasto.app/portfolio/problem/ author: "Daco Hsieh 謝明達" published: 2026-07-05 updated: 2026-08-06 --- # How I Understand Problems: an SEO Diagnosis > Breaking down a traffic decline through search data, content performance, and market shifts, then turning the findings into SEO and content strategy. ![9 Lives visual](https://dasto.app/portfolio/assets/9lifes-BdkImKmV.webp) - **Specimen**: iHealth 健康報報 - **Category**: SEO / Content Strategy / Health Education - **Location**: Taipei, Taiwan - **Collection Date**: 2019 / 08 / 28 - **Collector**: Daco - **Role**: Content Strategy / Visual Design / SEO Project at a glance When site traffic changed, I did not adjust content by instinct alone. I examined search data, content performance, and market shifts to break down the problem. Through comparisons, trend analysis, and content audits, I identified possible reasons for declining traffic and translated the findings into SEO and content strategy. This case shows how I form a traceable basis for decisions when information is incomplete. - **Project type**: SEO / Content strategy / Data analysis - **My role**: Problem diagnosis, data analysis, strategy planning - **Core strengths**: Problem framing, hypothesis building, insight translation While working at Taiwan Healthcare Delivery, I took over as head of the marketing department after Lunar New Year in 2018 and began re-examining how we operated our health content platform, iHealth. In March 2018, I started restructuring the site and rethinking how articles were produced. I did not approach SEO as a matter of studying algorithms alone. Instead, I returned to a more basic question: When people search for health issues, what are they actually hoping to find? I revised article titles, content structure, information depth, and visual explanations so that health knowledge became easier to understand and closer to the answers searchers were genuinely looking for. Those changes quickly led to growth. ![Traffic growth chart for iHealth](https://dasto.app/portfolio/assets/case02-p1-BcGy70wj.webp) *Figure 1 — Excerpted from the department report at the company mid-year meeting in 2018* But if the story ended there, it would only be a case where a strategy happened to align with the algorithm at that moment. The real turning point came at the end of September 2018. Google updated its algorithm, and iHealth traffic suddenly dropped sharply. ![Traffic decline chart for iHealth](https://dasto.app/portfolio/assets/case02-p2-DWMNTeOa.webp) *Figure 2 — Excerpted from the company annual kickoff report in 2019* That was the hardest moment in the entire project. The previous year had gone well, but traffic declined noticeably within a short time. Situations like this make it easy to question everything: Was the direction wrong? Should we immediately start adjusting for the algorithm? My judgment was this: the core direction should not change. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. What we were doing was fundamentally the same: taking professional and complex health knowledge and turning it into articles that ordinary readers could understand, that were complete enough to be useful, and that could genuinely solve the question behind a search. ![Keyword performance chart for iHealth](https://dasto.app/portfolio/assets/case02-p3-B4O_W2f9.webp) *Figure 3 — Excerpted from the company annual kickoff report in 2019* So we did not chase short-term SEO tricks. We kept producing health content that was clearer, more complete, and more useful. Later, traffic recovered, and it performed even better than before. By 2019, iHealth had reached the first page of Google for many core health keywords, including diabetes, hypertension, thyroid conditions, menopause, gout, and acid reflux. Peak daily unique visitors exceeded 60,000, and core keywords such as diabetes, hypertension, and cholesterol gradually climbed to the first and second positions in Google search results. ![Traffic recovery chart for iHealth](https://dasto.app/portfolio/assets/case02-p4-o8PI8wul.webp) *Figure 4 — Excerpted from the company mid-year meeting report in 2019* This case made me even more certain of one thing: The most effective strategy is not chasing every change in the rules. It is understanding the root problem those rules are trying to solve. > When I deal with a problem, I return first to its deepest logic. > > I don't begin by asking, 'What is everyone else doing?' I begin by asking, 'What is this supposed to solve in the first place?' > > Once I find that original principle, I align the strategy, content, design, or system to it. > > iHealth made this even clearer to me: when external rules keep changing, what you can rely on is not the change itself, but the place where the problem began. > The iHealth site has since been shut down, but some pages can still be found through the Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20240713033626/https://www.ihealth.com.tw/article/%E7%B3%96%E5%B0%BF%E7%97%85/ --- Author: Daco Hsieh 謝明達 · Contact: enodaco@gmail.com · Portfolio home: https://dasto.app/portfolio/en/ · 中文版: https://dasto.app/portfolio/problem/