The brief. A Tbilisi tattoo studio grew from a single location into an international multilingual network and was moving to a new site structure (studio-tattoo.com, EN + RU). The risk in any move like this is the usual one: losing the rankings built up over years. The studio already had Russian-language organic traffic from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and Israel that could not be lost. Our job was to migrate the site so rankings held — and the structure could carry the expansion into new cities and a second language.

SEO migration of studio-tattoo.com tattoo studio site — studio-tattoo.com after migration to a multilingual network — by Global One Digital

What we did in the migration

We ran the move as a checklist, not a hope — the same method as any SEO migration:

A full URL map with single 301 redirects from old to new addresses — no chains, no dead ends.
hreflang between the RU and EN versions so Google never confuses the languages or cannibalises pages.
On-page parity: titles, meta, internal links and schema carried across, not dropped in the move.
Content built around real demand — laser tattoo removal, services (piercing, permanent makeup), a blog answering client questions.
Search Console monitoring through the first weeks, when volatility is highest and fast fixes matter.

Laser tattoo removal page ranking for the local money query — The laser-removal service page — about position 5 for its primary local query

Results (Google Search Console data)

September 2025 → June 2026, all verifiable:

Metric	Start	Now
Monthly impressions	~794	up to 4,754 (6×)
Rankings lost in migration	none — visibility grew rather than dropped
Queries with impressions	—	560+

The site holds top-3 and top-5 positions across its commercial core of local tattoo, piercing and laser-removal queries — the traffic that turns into booked appointments.

Why the migration kept every ranking

Most post-migration drops come from small things: missing 301s, lost metadata, orphaned pages, changed URLs with no map. We closed each one before launch and watched indexation after. So instead of the typical 30-60% traffic drop, the site preserved its accumulated authority and kept growing on the new structure.

FAQ

Will the site lose rankings during migration?

With a proper migration, no. A short dip in the first weeks is normal; the large, lasting drops come only from mistakes — broken redirects, lost metadata — which the URL map prevents.

How do you handle the multilingual side (RU + EN)?

Languages are separated with hreflang, each with its own content rather than a translation. Google serves the right version per user language and the pages do not compete.