For independents losing frame customers to a website
The eye test is how they arrive and the glasses are the business, and most sites are silent about the second.
A report on your own site, showing which of your two customers it is currently written for.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
4 minutes
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A passion-driven, good-hearted and reliable service provider with the competency of a genius when it comes to software engineering, AI technology and marketing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Optometry sells two things that barely resemble each other: a bulk-billed eye test that costs the patient nothing, and a pair of glasses that might cost them six hundred dollars.
The search behaviour splits along exactly that line, and most practice websites are written as though only the first one exists.
One search is somebody overdue for a test who wants to know if it is bulk billed and whether they can get in this week. The other is somebody choosing frames, comparing brands and prices against an online retailer.
These want opposite pages. The test searcher wants booking, cost and availability in the first screen. The frame buyer wants to see what you stock, what the lenses actually cost once you add the coatings, and why you rather than a website.
Most optometry sites serve the first customer competently and ignore the second entirely, which is a problem because the second one carries the margin. The eye test is how they arrive; the dispensing is the business.
The frame buyer's real question is never asked out loud on these sites: why would I not buy these online for a third of the price. A practice that answers it plainly, about fitting, measurement, adjustment and what goes wrong, wins a customer who was on the way to a website.
Dry eye, myopia control in children, orthokeratology, diabetic eye checks, macular degeneration, glaucoma monitoring, behavioural optometry. Each is a real search, made by somebody with a specific problem and a much longer relationship attached.
These are the pages that separate a practice from the chains, because a chain optimises for volume and cannot credibly own a clinical speciality. If you do myopia control or dry eye properly, that is the strongest thing on your site.
Children's myopia in particular is searched hard by anxious parents who have just been told their child's prescription is changing quickly. It is a long relationship, an involved treatment, and almost nobody has written a decent page about it.
The referral half matters too. Optometrists receive a great deal of work from GPs and specialists, and a site that explains clearly what you do and what you refer on makes you the practice a GP remembers.
Every optometry search sits between a chain with a marketing budget and an online retailer with no overheads. Winning on either of those grounds is not possible, and trying is how independents lose.
What an independent has is continuity and time. The same optometrist each visit, longer appointments, records that go back years, and the ability to say something true about a patient's eyes rather than reading a screen.
That is not marketing language, it is the actual product difference, and it is almost never written down. A page about what a longer appointment lets you find is more persuasive than any amount of frame photography.
The other real advantage is being local in a way a chain cannot be. Named staff, a real photograph of the practice, the actual street, and reviews from people in the same suburb.
A page for each clinical service, an honest answer to the online-glasses question, a listing with correct hours and bulk-billing status, and online booking that works on a phone.
The listing carries the routine work. Somebody overdue for a test picks from a map, and the practice with correct hours, a booking link and recent reviews takes the appointment before any website is opened.
The clinical pages carry the valuable work, and they keep earning for years. One per service, written from what you actually see in the chair rather than from a manufacturer's brochure.
Then the dispensing half, which is the one worth being brave on: say what you stock, say roughly what a complete pair costs with the lenses people actually need, and say plainly what an online purchase gets wrong.
The eye test is how a patient arrives and the glasses are how the practice survives. Almost every optometry website is written for the arrival and silent about the part that pays for it.
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Weeks for the listing, three to six months for the clinical pages. The listing is the urgent half because routine tests are booked straight off the map.
A realistic range for a complete pair, with the lenses people actually buy. Vagueness sends the price-sensitive patient to an online retailer, which is the outcome you were trying to avoid.
Not on brand or price. On continuity, appointment length and clinical depth, which are real differences that no chain page can credibly claim.
It is one of the most underserved searches in the profession. Anxious parents look for it specifically, and it is a multi-year relationship rather than a single appointment.