Flagship case study
Six years running digital operations for a growing studio group
Over the five years to October 2025, non-branded organic traffic to the site grew from around 2,765 visits a month to 20,440, while the group's reliance on brand searches fell away almost entirely.
The role
A board-level engagement
No Regrets is a premium tattoo studio group that grew from four locations to twelve across the period we worked with them, with the original studios clustered in the south west of England. Millside was engaged in a board-level, Technology Director-style role, and took ownership of digital operations across every location, with the engagement running for six years.
- Client
- No Regrets
- Growth
- 4 → 12 locations, UK-wide
- Engagement
- Six years, board-level, Technology Director-style
- Ad spend managed
- Seven figures annually
The starting point
What we inherited
The site was an ageing WordPress build on a WP Bakery theme, unoptimised and carrying almost no content. Analytics was still running on Universal Analytics, Search Console was not being monitored by anyone, and there was no CRM at all.
Sales ran through an email inbox, with the snooze function standing in as the follow-up reminder system. Every enquiry arrived as a form submission with no tracking parameters attached, so nobody could say which enquiries came from where, or which of them became profitable. Reporting meant spreadsheets; there was no financial reporting or forecasting, and availability across the studios was tracked on manual gap sheets.
None of the channels had a strategy behind them, and with no measurement in place there was no way to build one.
Sequencing
Why the website came first
Although the obvious priority seemed to be the CRM (since that was where the most expensive gap sat) we decided to start with the website instead.
The reason was that the infrastructure was not solid enough to bring a CRM into the fold. There is little point building a clever sales pipeline when the site feeding it cannot properly attract the right leads in the first place. So the rebuild came first, with new content written to lift the brand, and proper reporting and monitoring put in place alongside it.
That sequencing then defined everything that followed. Once the site was capturing enquiries and the tracking and reporting were integrated so we could see what was happening, we could judge every subsequent change on how it affected the numbers.
The evidence
Five years of organic growth
Between October 2020 and October 2025 (the period we ran the group's digital operations) Ahrefs estimated non-branded organic traffic grew from around 2,765 a month to 20,440 - a rise of 7.4 times.
The share matters as much as the total. In 2020, branded search accounted for 45.5% of the site's organic traffic. By 2025, that had fallen to 13.1%, meaning that the growth came overwhelmingly from people who had not heard of the studio, over a period when the business tripled in size.
In July 2025 we migrated the group from nrstudios.co.uk to noregrets.tattoo, a name change and a domain change at the same time. Three months later the site was at its strongest measured point.
Growth
Opening new studios
We had already helped other operators open studios before No Regrets began expanding, so we were able to draw on lessons learnt from that experience from the beginning. That being said, the first two openings were still chaotic. Integrations, technical setup, Google Business Profile listings, calendar configuration and reporting were all handled on the fly while the studio was trying to open its doors.
After the first two openings, we had a repeatable task list that could be replicated for every new site - turning each opening from an improvisation into a process. By the time the group reached twelve locations, a new studio came online with its own listing, location page, diary and reporting automatically accounted for.
In detail
The engagement in detail
The work split into five areas, each written up separately.
CRM and sales process
Replacing an email inbox with tracked enquiry capture, automated follow-up, WhatsApp confirmations and deposits taken at the point of consultation, including three platforms trialled before selecting the right one.
Reporting and dashboards
Live, on-demand reporting to replace a monthly pack, and the argument for watching conversion rate, average booking value, time to win and lead volume instead of watching cash flow.
Payments and deposits
How trying to save on payment processor fees cost more than it saved, and what a deposit process needs to do to protect a studio’s diary.
Discovery and internal linking at scale
Twelve studios concentrated in one region, and how they were kept from competing with each other in search without changing a single URL.
Migration and international
Moving a twelve-studio group to a new domain and a new TLD, then building and later unwinding a US arm with its own compliance and languages.
The outcome
What it added up to
Over six years the group went from four studios to twelve, from no CRM to an automated sales operation, and from one enormous spreadsheet to live reporting granular enough to see performance by studio, by artist, by salesperson, by channel and by individual ad.
We managed a seven-figure annual advertising spend across the group, at times running campaigns on the brand's own profiles and at other times managing more than twenty individual artist ad accounts in parallel, all within the same engagement.
Most of what made this a success can apply to any service business with more than one site, and very little of it is specific to tattooing. The problems that come with a second, third or fourth location are consistent: profiles that drift, diaries that don't talk to each other, enquiries nobody can attribute, and reporting that arrives too late to act on. Here is how we approach multi-location digital operations, and what taking on this kind of engagement directly, as a fractional role rather than a project, looks like.