SEO analysis of dental clinics in Dnipro: who tops Google and how many links it takes to catch up

We analysed the SEO of dental clinics in Dnipro for a clinic whose site is visible in Google only for its own name. Across ten target queries, 20 clinics appear most often in the top 20, and the top-10 median is 34,034 keywords and 60 referring domains. The leaders add 8–9 new referring domains a month, while two clinics in the top 5 have almost no links and win with a large site structure. Below are the market figures, two strategies and a sample report in PDF.

About the client and the task

The client is a dental clinic in Dnipro. We do not disclose its name, so in this article it is ‘the clinic’ or ‘the clinic’s site’. The site is small: 16 pages, one language version, and most of the service pages are about surgery.

The owner wanted to understand why the site does not bring patients from search and how much it would cost to fix that. The report had to answer seven questions:

1. Who the clinic’s SEO competitors in Dnipro are.
2. How far the clinic is behind them in links.
3. How fast the competitors are growing.
4. How the number of their links has changed month by month.
5. What the competitors’ link structure looks like.
6. What budget is needed to catch up and overtake them.
7. What the strategy should be: how many links a month and of which types.

The starting point: the site is visible only for its name

All nine keywords are the clinic’s name or its address. For the queries patients use to look for a dentist (‘стоматологія дніпро’ (dentist Dnipro), ‘імплантація зубів дніпро’ (dental implants Dnipro)), the site is not in the top 20. What else we found:

1. 10 of the 15 service pages are about tooth extraction. There are no pages for veneers, paediatric dentistry, prosthetics, caries treatment, whitening or braces.
2. There is no Russian-language version, although a large share of demand in Dnipro is in Russian: ‘чистка зубов днепр’ (teeth cleaning Dnipro) is searched 320 times a month, the Ukrainian variant 70 times.
3. The old domain redirects to the new one, but it had no links either, so the move brought no link ‘legacy’.
4. There are no toxic links, so link building can start from a clean slate.

How we identified the competitors

The standard ‘Competitors’ report in Serpstat does not work here. It looks for sites with the same keywords, and the clinic has only branded ones, so the list returns clinics with the same name from other cities and countries.

So we started from the search results: we took Google’s top 20 for ten target queries and counted which sites appear most often. The queries are in Ukrainian and Russian: ‘стоматологія дніпро’, ‘стоматология днепр’ (dentist Dnipro), ‘імплантація зубів дніпро’, ‘имплантация зубов днепр’ (dental implants Dnipro), ‘удаление зубов днепр’ (tooth extraction Dnipro), ‘чистка зубів дніпро’, ‘чистка зубов днепр’ (teeth cleaning Dnipro), ‘коронки на зубы днепр’ (dental crowns Dnipro), ‘удаление зуба мудрости днепр’ (wisdom tooth removal Dnipro), ‘виниры днепр’ (veneers Dnipro). We did not count aggregators such as doctor directories, because they are not clinics.

Who is at the top of Google among dental clinics in Dnipro

The ten clinics that appear most often in the top 20. Serpstat data, October 2026.

The last two sites in the list belong to the same clinic chain. The full list of 20 competitors is in the sample report below.

Links are not the only reason for the gap

The relationship between links and rankings in this niche is not direct. Three examples from the twenty clinics:

1. dentalstudio.dp.ua — 1 referring domain, yet 9 of 10 queries in the top 20 with an average position of 5.8.
2. dentaltech.com.ua — 13 referring domains, 8 of 10 queries in the top 20, average position 6.5.
3. stomatologiya.com.ua — 16 referring domains and the best average position among all twenty clinics: 4.3.

What these sites have in common is a large structure: 31,000–47,000 keywords. That means hundreds of pages for services, prices, doctors and city districts, in two languages. Hence the main conclusion for the client: links are needed, but without new pages they will not deliver results. The links simply have nowhere to point.

How fast competitors build links

For the seven strongest clinics we counted new referring domains month by month. Spam networks were filtered out.

What this shows:

1. In 2026 all competitors are building links 2–5 times faster than in 2025. Part of the jump may be explained by Serpstat indexing links better, so the pace of the last six months is the more reliable benchmark.
2. The three most active clinics add 8–9 new domains a month each.
3. One of them gained 68 of its 80 domains in the last year. It is an example of a clinic that started systematic link building almost from zero and already has about 13,700 visits a month.

What kind of links dental clinics buy

1. Articles on websites — about 85% of new referring domains. These are regional news, women’s and medical sites with an SDR of 25–45.
2. Catalogues, directories, city portals — the second-largest type. Eight of the eight clinics checked have links from the same city portal.
3. Forums are used by only one clinic in seven.
4. Where the links point: about half go to the home page, the rest to service pages: implants, root canal treatment under a microscope, paediatric dentistry, tooth extraction.
5. Anchors: the site address and the clinic’s name dominate. Commercial anchors such as ‘стоматология днепр’ are rare.

The share of dofollow links ranges from 75% to 100% across clinics. A shortlist of 22 referring domains used by four or more competitors at once is in the sample report.

Spam in competitors’ link profiles

The leader of the search results has 106 of its 169 referring domains coming from spam networks: automatically generated sites with advertising anchors, almost all nofollow. Most of them appeared within a single month, January 2026. The clinic did not buy them: this kind of spam attaches itself to prominent sites in the niche. The clinic’s real profile is 63 domains.

There are two conclusions for the client. First: the number of referring domains shown by the tool has to be cleaned of spam, otherwise the target will be overstated by more than a factor of two. Second: once the site starts growing, spam may appear in its profile too, so we planned a profile check once a quarter.

How much it takes to catch up

Competitors are growing too, so dividing the gap by your own pace is wrong. We calculated it this way: gap / (our pace − competitor’s pace). For example, the market median is 75 domains away and grows by 4 a month. At 8 domains a month the net pace is 4, so 75 / 4 ≈ 19 months.

At 8 domains a month the clinic reaches the market average in a year and a half, but the leaders stay out of reach. To catch up with the three most active clinics, it takes 15 or more.

The two strategies we proposed

The budget is an estimate of the cost of placements on sites with an SDR of 25–45; exact prices are confirmed when the donor sites are selected. The SDR forecast is a benchmark based on competitors with the same number of referring domains, not a guarantee.

We recommended Strategy A together with expanding the site structure: new service pages and a Russian version. Strategy B makes sense if the clinic wants to compete with the most active players within a year and expands the site in parallel in the same way.

Rules for both strategies

1. A donor site is a Ukrainian site with real traffic; topics: medicine, health, family, city portals.
2. Anchors: 35% the clinic’s name, 25% the site address, 15% the name with a keyword, no more than 5% exact commercial queries.
3. Half of the links go to the home page, half to service pages.
4. Start with 4–5 domains in the first month and reach the planned pace within 2–3 months.

What we do not do

1. We do not buy links in bulk packages from Telegram networks.
2. We do not use PBNs — they carry a risk of a Google manual action.
3. We do not take donor sites without real traffic, even with a high SDR.
4. We do not point all links at the home page only.

The plan for the first month

1. Check in Google Search Console that all 16 pages are indexed and that sitemap.xml and robots.txt are accessible.
2. Register the clinic in the free directories where all the competitors are already listed.
3. Put together a shortlist of 30 donor sites and check the prices.
4. Place the first 6–8 articles: half to the home page, half to the implant and tooth extraction pages.
5. Prepare a plan for expanding the structure: veneers, paediatric dentistry, prosthetics, caries treatment, whitening, prices, doctors, a Russian version.

What a dental clinic owner can take from this

1. Look for competitors in the search results, not in a tool’s report. If the site is visible only for its name, the automatic list will be wrong.
2. Count the net pace, not the gap. If you buy as many links as a competitor does, you are not catching up with them.
3. Pages first, links second. A clinic with one referring domain holds a top-5 position thanks to its site structure.
4. Clean the figures of spam. Two thirds of the market leader’s referring domains are automatic spam.
5. Do not forget Russian-language queries: in Dnipro they are searched several times more often than Ukrainian ones.

Data limitations: all figures come from Serpstat, so SDR cannot be compared with DR from Ahrefs. Search volumes for Dnipro are understated in the tool, so we ranked competitors by how often they appear in the search results, not by traffic.

If you need an analysis like this for your clinic, see how we work with the niche on the dental clinic marketing page. And we have put together the overall picture of the market in our research on the dental market in Ukraine.

FAQ — common questions about SEO competitor analysis for dental clinics