Case study

Career Lume

TheRankHQ designed and built Career Lume from scratch: a college discovery platform for Indian students with more than 44,800 verified college profiles, five free college predictors and a career assessment, built to be honest where college portals usually are not.

College profiles published: 44,800+
Careers scored on fit and reality: 220+

The Career Lume homepage: "Find the right college. Honestly." with a search box and 44,800+ colleges, 200+ courses and 30 streams, all verified

Industry

EdTech, college discovery

Services

Product strategy, design and development, content system, technical SEO

Built on

Next.js, Payload CMS and PostgreSQL

Website

careerlume.com

Where it started

Choosing a college is one of the most expensive decisions an Indian student makes, and most of the research happens on college portals. Those portals have had ten to fifteen years and large teams to build millions of pages. Many of them publish rankings of their own, ask for a phone number before a tool shows its answer, and pay counsellors on commission. Career Lume set out to be the honest alternative: verified data, no ranking of its own, and guidance that is free for students. A new site cannot out-publish portals that size, so the brief was to build something they would find hard to copy, from an empty folder.

What the market does, and what we built

A typical college portal

A ranking of its own, with no method shown
A phone number demanded before a tool shows its result
Counsellors paid on commission
Fees and placement figures with no source or date
Thousands of templated pages, the same text with a different name
Listings where position can be bought

Career Lume

No ranking of its own: NIRF and five other published rankings side by side, each with its method
Predictor results shown at once, with no phone number required
Salaried counsellors, free for students
Every figure tied to an official source and the year it is from
Every page passed through a content quality gate before it is published
No college can pay to change its position in a listing

The strategy: be deeper and more honest, not bigger

Career Lume was built from scratch, so every decision was ours to make. Six of them shaped it, and each started from a problem in the market. Each part below sets out that problem and what we built.

Part 1 of 6

Audit the market before building

The first job was to find out what the established portals actually have, page type by page type.

The problem

Portals with ten to fifteen years of pages cannot be beaten on volume
Building a list of features from memory copies the leaders, including their mistakes
Without knowing where they are thin, there is nowhere to be better

The solution

The five largest portals audited through their own sitemaps, counting every kind of page they publish
The finding: the gap was scale, not features, so the answer was depth where they are thin
Long-form career guides far deeper than the portals’ own, and career-by-industry pages that none of the five has
Each college profile covering courses and fees, placements, cutoffs and campus on one page, under tabs

Part 2 of 6

A data platform, not a brochure site

College data is many kinds of record that change every year. It needed a real data model behind it.

The problem

Fees, cutoffs, placements and ranks all change yearly, and pages written by hand go stale
Tens of thousands of colleges cannot be managed in spreadsheets
Counts typed into copy are wrong the day after they are written

The solution

A custom platform on Next.js, Payload CMS and PostgreSQL, with 45 data collections
Separate records for colleges, courses, cutoffs, yearly placements, rankings, exams, careers, scholarships, reviews and questions
More than 44,800 college profiles published, across 30 streams and 200+ courses
Counts on pages filled from the live data, and background workers for imports, sitemaps, email and scheduled publishing

Part 3 of 6

Honest by design

Honesty is easy to claim and hard to prove, so it was built into how the site works.

The problem

Portal rankings are opaque, and a student cannot tell what bought a position
Counselling paid on commission pushes whichever college pays most
A phone number, once given, is passed to many colleges

The solution

No ranking of its own: NIRF, The Week, India Today, Outlook, QS and Times Higher Education shown side by side with links to each method
Listings ordered by how much verified evidence exists for a college, and no college can pay to change its place
Counsellors on salary, and a student’s details kept to Career Lume and the one counsellor assigned
Every enquiry phone-verified by one-time code, with explicit consent recorded

Part 4 of 6

Content with a quality gate

Publishing thousands of pages is easy. Publishing thousands that are accurate and worth reading is the hard part.

The problem

Pages generated at scale read as templates: the same sentences with a different city
A plausible-looking invented number is the commonest error in this kind of content
Education choices affect a person’s money and future, so search engines hold the content to a higher standard

The solution

Every page begins as a researched specification: more than 1,000 written, including 760 colleges and 138 course-by-city pages
Facts taken from official sources only, each with its year, and anything that cannot be verified is marked as missing rather than guessed
An automated quality gate that blocks a page from publishing if it fails: padded phrases, repeated openings, overlong paragraphs, missing sources
A separate fact-checking pass on every batch, after the automated one

Part 5 of 6

Tools that give the answer first

A tool that hides its result behind a form is a lead form with a tool painted on it.

The problem

College predictors that demand a phone number before showing anything
Career quizzes that only reflect back what a student says they like
Comparing colleges means opening several tabs and a spreadsheet

The solution

Five free predictors, for JEE Main, JEE Advanced, NEET UG, CAT and CLAT, built on official counselling data, with results shown at once and no phone number required
Side-by-side comparison of up to four colleges: cutoffs, intake, placements and rankings
Career Compass: 59 questions that score 220+ careers on both fit and reality, and say so when an easy option is likely to be the wrong one
A paid report and one-to-one counselling built in, with payments handled on the site

Part 6 of 6

Built to be found, by search and by AI

Search was part of the build from the first page, not a layer added at the end.

The problem

Pages that give search engines no structured facts about a college or an exam
Titles and descriptions written by hand drift, duplicate and run too long
AI assistants quote pages that answer directly, and skip those that do not

The solution

Structured data on every page type: college, FAQ, quiz and breadcrumb markup
Titles and descriptions generated by rule, so each is unique and the right length
Every section opening with a direct answer, written to be quoted by AI assistants as well as read by people
Internal links managed by rule, and an installable app that keeps working on slow connections

Building a product, not just a website?

We plan it against the market first, then design and build it from scratch.

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The finished product

Career Lume is live at careerlume.com. These are captures of the site as it is today.

The homepage

One promise, stated plainly

“Find the right college. Honestly.” A search box, the numbers behind it, and three ways in: browse colleges, explore exams or talk to a counsellor.

Search first
Colleges, courses and exams from one box.
Every way to browse
By stream, city, course, university and exam.
Counselling
Free for students, and offered rather than pushed.

A college profile

The facts a student needs, before anything else

Fees, average package, placement rate and rank sit at the top of every profile, with the latest cutoffs by category beside the overview.

Key figures
Fees range, average package, placement rate, rank and student numbers.
Cutoffs
Closing ranks by category, for the latest counselling round.
Compare and save
Add a college to a comparison or a shortlist in one press.

Career Compass

A career test that can say no

Each career is scored twice: how well it fits the student, and how realistic it is for them. A career that is easy to enter but a poor fit is marked as exactly that.

Fit
Interests, strengths, values and how the student likes to work.
Reality
Pay, length of study and the trade-offs the student will accept.
The path
The courses, exams and colleges that lead to each career.

The JEE Main College Predictor on Career Lume: a free tool based on JoSAA cutoffs, with no phone number required

A college predictor

The result without the phone number

A student enters a rank and category and sees the colleges within reach, based on official counselling cutoffs. Asking a counsellor to review the list is optional, and sits to one side.

Official data
Built on published counselling closing ranks.
No gate
No sign-up and no phone number to see the result.
Method shown
The data sources and the date they are current to, on the page.

College profiles published: 44.8K+
Courses: 200+
Careers scored: 220+
Free college predictors: 5

Where it stands

Career Lume is a working product: a platform its team can keep filling without a developer, a content method that keeps quality up as the page count grows, and a position the large portals cannot take without changing how they earn. Traffic and lead results will be added here once there is a full period to measure.

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