Journal · · Vayam Bhansali
A student housing site that ranks: how we built EDU Stay
How we built edustay.org for broker-free student housing near UPES Dehradun. Per-property pages, structured data, lighter images and leads you can count.
EDU Stay places students in hostels, PGs and flats around UPES in Kandoli and Bidholi, with no brokerage. The people deciding are usually parents, so the site has one job: be calm, be clear, and get found by someone searching for a room near UPES.
One page per property
The first version, in May 2026, put every listing on one page with filters. It worked for browsing but gave search engines very little to hold on to. In the October rebuild, every property got its own page with its own search title, its own social preview and structured data describing the listing. A parent searching for a specific area now lands on a page about that place, not a filtered list.
Images that do not stall the page
Property photos straight from a phone are heavy, and parents often browse on mobile data. We compress every photo when it is uploaded in the admin panel. Listing photos went from 263 KB to 58 KB each, 78% lighter, without looking worse.
An admin panel the team runs itself
Listings, images, ranking, price, tags, facilities and map links are all edited in the admin panel. Nobody has to call a developer to add a new PG.
Leads you can count
The real conversion on a housing site is a WhatsApp message, not a form. We set up Google Analytics to count every WhatsApp click as a lead, verified the site in Search Console, and shipped the sitemap and robots rules so new properties get picked up.
The full build is in the EDU Stay case study. If your business depends on people finding you locally, this is the kind of search work we do.