How Tutors Get Students Without Paying a Marketplace 25%
TL;DR: Marketplaces are a great way to find your first students and a terrible way to keep them — they take a percentage of every lesson, forever, and they own the relationship. A four-page website plus a Google Business Profile lets parents find you directly. It needs your subjects, levels, rates, results, and one way to book a trial.
The Marketplace Math
Tutoring platforms typically take somewhere between 15% and 30% of what you charge. Some take a cut of the first lesson only; most take it for the life of the student.
At $50 an hour, ten hours a week, a 20% commission is $100 a week. Over a school year, that’s around $4,000 — for a service that stops adding value the moment the student is yours.
It’s worse than the money, though. On a marketplace:
- Your students belong to the platform, not to you.
- You compete on price against tutors in lower-cost countries.
- Your ranking can change overnight because of an algorithm change.
- You can’t build a reputation you take with you.
Use them to fill empty slots. Don’t build your business inside them.
Where Direct Students Actually Come From
Three channels, in order of value:
- Search. “Maths tutor [suburb]”, “GCSE physics tutor near me”, “IELTS teacher online”. This is a parent with a decision to make this week.
- Referral. Parents talk. Every happy parent is a source of two more — but only if there’s a link they can send.
- Google Business Profile. Free, ranks locally, holds reviews. Most tutors never claim one, which makes it easy to stand out.
All three need one thing: a page that exists when someone goes looking.
The Five Things a Tutor Site Needs
1. Subjects and levels — precisely
Not “maths and science.” Parents search for exact curricula and exam boards:
- GCSE Maths (AQA, Edexcel)
- A-Level Physics
- IB Maths HL
- SAT Math & Reading
- IELTS Academic, target band 7+
- Grade 4–8 primary maths
Precision is the ranking strategy and the trust signal at once. A parent whose child is doing Edexcel Higher and sees “Edexcel Higher” on your page has already decided.
2. Your rate
Publish it. Tutors hide rates for the same reason trainers do, and lose the same customers.
Give the structure:
- 1-on-1 online, 60 min — $45
- 1-on-1 in person (within 5km) — $60
- Small group of 3, 90 min — $30 per student
- Block of 10 lessons — 10% off
Parents comparing three tutors will contact the two who published prices.
3. Results, stated plainly
This is the whole sale. Parents buy an outcome, not an hour.
- “Last year, 14 of 17 GCSE students improved by two grades or more.”
- “Average IELTS improvement: 1.0 band over 12 weeks.”
- “Nine students into selective schools since 2022.”
If you’re just starting, use what’s true — your own qualifications, your teaching background, your degree. Don’t invent numbers. A specific credential beats a vague claim about passion for learning.
4. Who you are, and safety
For anyone teaching children, this section is not optional and should be near the top:
- Background check status (DBS, WWCC, police check — whatever applies where you are)
- Qualifications and where you got them
- Years teaching, and whether you’ve taught in schools
- A real photo of your face
Parents will not book a tutor whose face they haven’t seen.
5. A trial lesson, one tap away
The single highest-converting offer in tutoring is a short, cheap or free trial. It removes the risk from a decision the parent is nervous about.
Make the button say what it is — “Book a free 20-minute trial” — and put it in the header, after the pricing, and at the bottom.
Online Tutors: Say How It Works
If you teach remotely, the objection is always “will my kid actually pay attention on a screen?” Answer it directly:
- Which platform you use, and whether there’s a shared whiteboard
- What the parent gets after each lesson — a summary, homework, progress notes
- How you handle homework between sessions
- Your cancellation and reschedule policy
The tutors who publish this get chosen over the ones who don’t.
The Local SEO Half
If you tutor in person, this doubles your inbound:
- Claim your Google Business Profile. Set the service area to the suburbs you cover.
- Use the same name, phone, and address everywhere.
- Get reviews from parents. Five recent, specific reviews beat twenty old ones.
- Name your suburbs on the site itself, in text.
“Maths tutor in [suburb]” is a low-competition, high-intent search in almost every city. Most tutors aren’t targeting it because most tutors don’t have a site.
The Four Pages
- Home — subjects, levels, rate, results, trial button.
- Subjects — one section per subject with exam boards and levels.
- About — qualifications, checks, photo, teaching approach.
- Contact / Book — trial booking, availability, response time.
Getting It Built Between Lessons
You don’t need a designer or a weekend. WebZum builds the site from a chat: you type your tutoring business name, tell it what you teach and what you charge, and it researches whatever’s online about you, writes the copy, generates the design, and puts it live in about five minutes. You see the whole thing before you pay anything, and you can put it on your own domain when you publish.
Adding a subject later is one sentence — “add A-Level Chemistry at $50/hour”. Term dates changed? “say I’m booked until September.”
The site also comes with an AI chatbot trained on your subjects and rates, so the parent messaging at 10pm asking “do you cover Edexcel Higher?” gets an answer instead of waiting until morning — which is usually when they message the next tutor.
Keep the 25%. Build your own tutoring site in five minutes and send parents there instead.