A study of tuition centre websites in Singapore

The Big Picture

Parents in Singapore are spending over SGD 1 billion a year on enrichment classes at tuition centres for their children. With an estimated 422,555 students enrolled in junior colleges,  primary and secondary schools and 70% of them taking tuition, an approximately SGD 3356 is spent per student for tuition every year compared to around SGD 680 spent in the United States, according to various estimates.

Surprisingly even though the tuition centre business is a big opportunity in Singapore,  there are only 1005 active tuition centre websites in Singapore, and only 413 of those get any significant traffic at all. 

With over 75,000 high intent searches a month for tuition centre related keywords in Singapore, using a website to capture this search intent is a huge opportunity for tuition centres in Singapore. 

About this study

At Konigle , we provide an AI web developer with digital marketing skills to help manage and build a website and also perform digital marketing at fraction of the cost of an in-house employee.

We were curious to know how tuition centres in Singapore are using the internet to get high quality leads. We did both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of active tuition centre websites in Singapore to understand current state of affairs and what tuition centres can do to harness the internet. Here's what we found.

Tuition Centre near me

Tuition Centres are as local a business it gets and in Singapore it takes on a slightly different dimension. Singapore has one of the most dense and cost effective train system in the world and google searches for coaching centres too begin with tuition centre near an MRT station.

But  ~95% of tuition centre websites we studied, did not use proper schema or location keywords.

If you have a website add a schema to the home page that has location specific information, you can also add a contact page where you can share best ways to reach your tuition centre.

Tuition Centre Directory

We have built a directory featuring coaching centres grouped by MRT Stations, ranked by visibility, reviews etc.

If you are tuition centre and are not listed on the relevant MRT page in our directory, you can reach out to us and get verified to get listed on the tuition centre directory by Konigle , to gain visibility and drive traffic to your tuition centre website.

If you're tuition centre is situated inside a mall, a great idea is to check if you're mall has a website with a directory of establishments, you should look to get listed on the mall directory with a link back to your website.

Tuition centre websites

Based on Ahrefs data, it's worth noting that a significant portion, about 65%, of the total estimated traffic from searches related to tuition centres in Singapore is captured by just 8 websites. Additionally, upon analyzing tuition centre websites, we found that around 68% of them lack functional sitemaps. This highlights a notable opportunity for website development and search engine optimization within the industry.

Interestingly, even the top-performing website in terms of traffic has a relatively low speed rating of only 15 out of 100 on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

If you do not have a website, we highly recommend building one. You can start building one quickly using Konigle.

Google My Business

Google enables local business discovery through the Local pack that shows up in search results for queries with local intent. It shows a map with 3 prominent results relevant to the search query. Ideally you would like to be in the top 3 but its important to have a fully complete Google My Business (GMB) listing. Some studies estimate ~ 93% of Google users having high trust in these listings.

Create or improve your Google My Business profile : If you need help with this, you can book a session with the website.cafe team and they would help you fix your Google My Business profile for your tuition centre.

The review myth

One of the most common feature of a tuition centre website in Singapore is a section on reviews. In fact we observed almost all websites showing reviews prominently. But the most important thing to understand is  people do not go looking for reviews as a way to find a tuition centre, rather people look for reviews once they have shortlisted a tuition centre. In today's world, people value helpful content and resources more than just reviews. We in fact found there aren't many searches for tuition centre reviews. There are less than 100 searches for keywords related to tuition centre reviews in a month, meaning reviews do not bring many visitors to a tuition centre.

But where reviews may help is in click through rates from search engine results, if the reviews and rating is added to the page schema, and as it shows up, review minded searchers may click through.

Final thoughts

It is important for tuition centre like any other business have a website that tells your story of what is it that you offer that other tuition centres do not. It is not just about showing reviews and results.

Talk about your story - why you exist, your teaching pedagogy, run a blog where you share opinions and useful resources so that parents and students are happy to leave their email with you to grow your email list.

Remember,

1.  Have a website that gets organic traffic 
2. Nurture an email list
3. Have an updated and properly setup google my business profile
4. Write helpful content at a fairly frequent cadence.
5. And remember, Reviews are important, but not the most important aspect of your website.