Before and after sketch
Referring domains Ahrefs reports for local rivals: a gap teardown
Your rivals are not Wikipedia. They are three clinics, shops or agencies in your own city and language, and their link profiles are small enough to read in an hour.
The clinic, the rivals and every count below are hypothetical. They illustrate a method and report no real result.
Before: the gap, on paper
| Site | Referring domains | Of which Polish | Share of top pages that rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our clinic | 18 | 9 | Low |
| Rival A | 74 | 61 | Good |
| Rival B | 52 | 40 | Medium |
| Rival C | 41 | 30 | Medium |
Reading the table like a trader
The raw gap looks like 56 domains. It is smaller than that. Rival A has probably collected years of directory and press mentions that no budget could replicate in a month.
A saner target is Rival C. It sits at 41 referring domains with 30 in Polish, so reaching 25 Polish domains is a plausible first goal. That means roughly 16 new ones, which the pay-as-you-go range of $1 to about $500 per link could cover with careful picks.
One more habit helps. Open five of each rival's linking domains in a browser and read them. If they are guest posts by the owner, local news items or supplier pages, you learn which doors in town are actually open.
Our counting runbook shows how to build the same table from your own exports, and the language walkthrough shows how to choose the donors afterwards.
What the clinic would do next
Three moves, in order.
Pick the page
One service page that rivals also target, such as implants or whitening.
Filter donors
Polish language, a niche close to health or lifestyle, and a price per row that keeps the basket small.
Hold back a reserve
Keep a third of the budget for a second round once the first placements have settled.
A week of the plan, day by day
Day one is the export from Ahrefs for each rival, which takes an hour. Day two goes to the spreadsheet, where you tag each domain by language and mark the ones you could plausibly win yourself.
On day three you open the marketplace and filter for Polish donors. Short sentences help here: price, language, niche, done.
Days four and five are for sleeping on the basket. Pay on the sixth, then leave it alone, because a reflex check every morning only produces anxiety.
On day seven, write down what you bought and why. Months later that note will tell you whether the method deserves a repeat.
Questions the clinic would ask
Should the clinic copy every domain Rival C has? No. Many of those links are directories and supplier pages that were free to get once and are not for sale today.
Should it pay for the highest Domain Rating it can afford? Rarely. A medium-strength Polish health blog that readers actually open tends to be a better match than an expensive general news site, and its price on the marketplace row will say so.
After: what a good outcome might look like
| Site | Referring domains | Of which Polish |
|---|---|---|
| Our clinic | 34 | 25 |
| Rival C | 43 | 32 |
Caveat
A smaller gap is not a promise
Rankings move for many reasons, from page quality to Google's spam updates such as the one in August 2025. Treat the table as a map of effort rather than a forecast.
- Re-pull the rivals' numbers monthly
- Judge by clicks in Search Console, not by counts