We Grew DormHouse Haliç’s Organic Clicks 6.7x!

For DormHouse Haliç, we’ve run an SEO and GEO program since March 2026 built on one simple but powerful fact: in Turkey’s national university placement exam (YKS), students make up to 24 preference choices, and the moment they’re accepted the 25th question is always the same — “Where will I stay?” We answered that question separately for each of the 23 universities a student could get into.

The result: monthly organic clicks grew 6.7x, search impressions grew 17.6x, we reached page one for dorm searches at 8 universities, and DormHouse Haliç filled all 305 of its beds.

A student makes at most 24 preference choices. The moment they’re accepted, the 25th question is always the same: Where will I stay? Today, the answer is DormHouse.

Discovery: Students Were Searching, We Weren’t Visible

We started with Google Search Console and GA4 data: in February 2026 there were only 269 monthly organic clicks and 290 queries with impressions, and we had zero university-specific pages. Because our brand name was “DormHouse Haliç,” Google only matched us with Haliç University — the only other two universities where we appeared in dorm searches were Bilgi and Kadir Has.

The data told us four things clearly: students searched by their university’s name (“haliç üni yurt,” “istün yurt,” “kadir has yurt”); we were invisible outside Haliç; search was tied to the YKS calendar (preferences July 29 – August 10); and students made their decision before searching for a dorm, researching careers and departments first.

The Idea: The 25th Question

In YKS, a student makes at most 24 preference choices. The moment they’re accepted, the 25th question is always the same: Where will I stay? Our idea was to answer that question separately for every university a student could get into — 23 universities, 23 separate answers.

Execution: We Answered the Question in Three Layers

• University pages: we built a dedicated “nearby men’s student dorm” page for each of 23 universities — each one covering campus proximity, transport, and dorm facilities tailored to that university’s students, all linked through a shared universities menu.
• Decision guides: we published 22 guide articles covering each university’s departments, campus life, orientation days, and scholarships.
• Pre-decision content: 11 pieces on career paths in AI, cybersecurity, fintech, and robotics reached students before they even wrote their preference list — the entire publishing calendar was built around YKS’s exam, preference, and placement dates.

Results: Preference Season Became DormHouse’s Season

Comparing February to August 2026, monthly organic clicks grew from 269 to 1,792 (6.7x), and monthly search impressions grew from 6,138 to 107,932 (17.6x). Queries with impressions grew from 290 to 1,069, and non-brand queries ranking in the top 10 grew from 145 to 732.

The university-level impact is striking: by July–August 2026 we reached page one for dorm searches at 8 universities — at the start of the project we weren’t even in the top 3 pages. Impressions for “nearby dorm” searches grew 10x (346 to 3,755), with 28 of 60 queries reaching the top 10.

AI Visibility (GEO)

DormHouse pages were cited as a source in Google’s AI answers (AI Overviews and AI Mode) 80 times, with 39,600 total impressions across those answers. Sessions from AI assistants like ChatGPT reached 164, with an engagement rate as high as 80%.

Conclusion

This wasn’t just a traffic increase — it meant a fully booked dorm: DormHouse Haliç filled all 305 beds in 2026. Brand searches (queries containing “DormHouse”) tripled, and organic traffic’s engagement rate reached 74.5%, far above paid social media’s 26.3%.

The 23 university pages, 22 department guides, and 11 career content pieces earned 394,450 impressions and 2,263 clicks in a single year — 69% of the site’s entire search impressions came from these project pages. The system now answers the same questions students ask every YKS season, and it’s ready for the 2027 preference period.

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