Ecla: +243% organic traffic through non-brand SEO

Ecla, a coliving and student housing operator, gained 243% organic traffic and 1,570% non-brand blog traffic in 2025 compared with 2024. On paid media, the share of brand campaigns in investment fell from 21% to 6% between May-September 2024 and the same period in 2025, with the cost per pre-booking on the brand campaign cut by half. These results come from a setup deployed by Growth Room since February 2025, combining SEO, presence on AI engines and paid acquisition on Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads.

About Ecla

Ecla operates in coliving and student housing. Its residences address individuals, students in particular, looking for accommodation in a given city. Demand materialises on the website, first as housing enquiries and then as pre-bookings.

The market is local before anything else. Searches name a city, sometimes a neighbourhood, and are usually made with no brand in mind. A residence is therefore not filled with a national audience, but with the demand expressed in its own area.

The starting point

Ecla wanted to strengthen its non-brand SEO visibility and generate more qualified housing enquiries. The target was people searching for accommodation without a brand in mind, that is, the part of the market brand awareness does not cover.

The paid setup, for its part, leaned heavily on the brand. The task was to redirect it towards cold acquisition and awareness, so the budget would stop going first to demand that was already won.

SEO: reaching non-brand demand

Audit, tracking and technical clean-up

We ran a full SEO audit covering technical, semantic, competitive and brand-visibility angles. Tracking was set up with quarterly reporting, and the technical base was cleaned: metadata, heading structures, indexing and structured data.

Architecture and local pillar pages

The site's SEO architecture was rebuilt and the local pillar pages optimised. That is the condition for existing on a housing search, which is always phrased at city level.

Non-brand content and conversion-led linking

We created content on qualified, conversion-close local non-brand queries: semantic analysis, briefs, page reviews, on-page optimisation and keyword targeting. Internal linking and CTAs were structured to bring that traffic back to the enquiry pages.

Blog and editorial calendar

The blog was developed with a content strategy and an editorial calendar. It covers searches made before the decision, the ones that do not belong on a residence page. This is where non-brand traffic grew the most.

Steering on business stakes

Rankings and leads are tracked continuously, and actions are prioritised according to business stakes and priority residences. SEO is therefore arbitrated on occupancy needs, not only on available search volume.

AI engines: measuring and feeding presence

We set up monitoring of LLMs and of Ecla's presence on AI engines. Performance is tracked over time, and content optimised for those answer surfaces is produced on the basis of that tracking.

Paid media: cutting the brand's share

On Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads, the setup was redirected towards cold acquisition and awareness. The share of brand campaigns in investment went from 21% to 6% between May-September 2024 and the same period in 2025.

On the brand campaign itself, the cost per pre-booking fell by 50%. In parallel, we implemented better tracking, with visibility on lead qualification: campaigns can now be judged on the quality of the enquiries they generate, not only on their number.

Results

• +243% organic traffic in 2025 compared with 2024.
• +1,570% non-brand traffic on the blog in 2025 compared with 2024.
• Brand share of media investment cut from 21% to 6% between May-September 2024 and May-September 2025.
• -50% cost per pre-booking on the brand campaign over that same period.
• Lead qualification tracking implemented, making it possible to follow the quality of the enquiries campaigns generate.

The engagement has been running since February 2025. The approach has not changed: organic visibility built on non-brand searches, city by city, and paid budget moved towards audiences that do not yet know the brand.

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