Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 24.11.2025 
UniHomes shares their award-nominated strategy and unique Content Ambassador Programme.
We’re delighted to share that our in-house SEO team have been named a finalist at the UK Search Awards for their market-leading innovation in evolving our visibility in Google search, driving more enquiries for our letting agents and helping more students find their perfect accommodation.
A cornerstone of this strategy was the creation of a unique Content Ambassador Programme, whereby current students act as local correspondents, producing authentic guides to making the most of student life in their respective cities and adding value to students’ property searches.
Who we are
UniHomes is the market-leading student accommodation advertising platform and utility management service provider.
Established in 2015 by our co-founders’ frustrations as both students and student lettings landlords, Phil, Brad and Luca recognised the complexity and complete lack of transparency facing students needing homes and utilities. They also understood the challenges facing letting agents marketing to ever-evolving, tech-savvy students.
UniHomes uniquely solves these problems by simplifying market complexity in one straightforward platform. We connect students with our established and extensive letting agent and operator networks, alongside our student utility bills package, which can be added to any student home, presenting the student with one all-inclusive price.
Having helped hundreds of thousands of students find their perfect all-inclusive university ‘home from home’ and sort their utility bills, we now operate in over 60 university towns and cities across the UK.
UniHomes is revolutionising the UK student rental accommodation market to open the door to stress-free living.
Our Campaign
As UniHomes’ first and newly created in-house SEO team, we needed to hit the ground running and find a way to make a huge impact across all areas of SEO, to meet ambitious growth targets for the new letting season.
Refreshing the incumbent SEO strategy, we sought to update in alignment with advancements in Google’s ranking algorithms. We overhauled our city landing pages to add our local rental market insights, helping students and standing out against other student accommodation sites. This included when to start looking for accommodation in their city, which areas and property sizes are most popular, as well as localising keyword targeting.
To complement this, we built and launched a Content Ambassador Programme, recruiting student writers in each city to act as correspondents on local student life. Our Content Ambassadors produce authentic guides on student nightlife, the best cafes and restaurants, activities and places to visit in their city, helping their fellow and future students make the most out of their time at uni.
All of this content added value to students’ house-hunting journey, helping to attract them to our site, keep them engaged and build trust in our brand, while futureproofing our site for visibility in AI search through highly citable content.
Alongside this, we made strides across other areas of SEO, improving indexing efficiency to ensure more property pages were visible in Google search results and could drive traffic. We also increased the flow of quality new backlinks, driving more students to the site from key and trusted sources.
Why it worked
The authenticity of our Content Ambassadors’ articles has made them a huge hit. We expected that students would engage better with guides written by the peers, currently living the student experience they’re writing about, than by our team – and this has certainly been proved to be the case, with a huge 60% increase in engagement time. They’re also being cited as sources by other websites including in student discussions on Reddit.
We’re proud to have invested in student journalism by providing paid writing opportunities via our programme, and recently took this further by stepping in to save the University of Birmingham’s historic student newspaper, Redbrick, from closure.
Our rapid progress across all areas of SEO delivered great year-on-year results, helping the business achieve KPIs while reducing reliance on paid channels to deliver traffic and enquiries.
Why the nomination matters
Our SEO team’s strategy and innovation is a core component of the UniHomes platform. We’re thrilled with the impact they continue to have in maximising traffic and the effectiveness of UniHomes.
We’re delighted to have been shortlisted for the UK Search Awards – widely recognised as the ultimate accolade of excellence in SEO – and especially so early into the life of our in-house SEO team. This is only the beginning and will give us confidence to keep trying fresh ideas.
We’re looking forward to joining our fellow nominees at the award ceremony in December!
