Optometry
Their eye benefit expires in December, and they have forgotten.
Most South African medical aid members have an optical benefit they can use every year or two, and an enormous number let it lapse unused. That is a marketing opportunity sitting in plain sight, and practically no independent practice builds around it.
Make the benefit the centrepiece
Frame the whole site around a question the patient has not thought to ask.
- Which medical aids you are contracted to
- What the typical benefit covers — test, frames, lenses — and how often
- Whether you check the available benefit before the appointment
- The cash price of an eye test for those without cover
- Which frame ranges fall fully within a standard benefit
- A plain reminder that unused benefits do not carry over
Clinical work is a separate, higher-value search
Diabetic retinal screening, glaucoma testing, dry eye treatment and children’s vision assessments are searched by people with a specific worry, not by people shopping for frames. Each is a distinct page, each carries far more intent than "glasses near me", and each is barely contested by the chains.
You are competing with chains, so do not imitate them
You will not outspend the national retailers on frame promotions. What you have that they do not is continuity — the same optometrist, who remembers the patient, with time for a proper examination. Say that, specifically, rather than running their kind of sale on a smaller budget.
The eye test price and the Saturday question
Two searches dominate this industry: what an eye test costs, and who is open on a Saturday. Practices that answer both on the page pick up work continuously from people who were comparing three or four options in a shopping centre.
- Eye test price, and whether medical aid covers it
- Saturday and after-hours availability
- Which medical aids you deal with
- Whether you do contact lens fittings, and what that costs separately
- Which frame brands you carry, because people search by brand
Medical aid benefits are confusing and that is your opening
Most people have no idea what their optical benefit covers, how often they can claim, or whether it resets in January. A page that explains it clearly is genuinely useful, gets shared, and positions the practice as the one that helps rather than the one that sells.
What your customers actually type
These are the searches that bring work to a business like yours. Every one of them is a page, a heading or a paragraph we build for deliberately.
- “optometrist near me”
- “eye test price your city”
- “optometrist open Saturday”
- “glasses your suburb”
- “contact lens fitting cost”
- “optometrist that takes medical aid”