Why vagueness costs money
Most consultancy websites are written in a register that sounds senior and conveys nothing: transformation, strategic alignment, operational excellence, partnering with organisations to unlock value.
The instinct behind it is understandable. A consultant does different things for different clients, the work is genuinely varied, and writing it specifically feels like closing doors.
What it does in practice is worse than closing doors. A buyer with a specific problem cannot match you to it, so you never enter the shortlist for the work you would have been best at. And the buyers who do get in touch arrive with no idea what you do, which means the first conversation is spent establishing scope — and when scope is unclear, the only comparable number is the day rate. You have been commoditised by your own homepage.
The consultants who do well on a website are not the ones with the best design. They are the ones a reader can place in about eight seconds.
Lead with the problem, not the method
The buyer does not have a methodology-shaped hole. They have a situation, and they are searching for the situation.
So the page they need to land on is named for the problem: a finance function that cannot close the month, a manufacturing line with a quality escape nobody can trace, a charity that has outgrown its governance, a business where two systems were never integrated after an acquisition, a team that has lost three senior people in a year.
On each of those pages:
- The problem described in enough detail that somebody living it thinks "that is us" — including the symptoms they would recognise before they could name the cause.
- What usually turns out to be going on underneath. This is where you demonstrate judgement rather than claim it.
- What you would actually do, in sequence, with rough durations. Not a methodology diagram — the real sequence of a real engagement.
- What it typically costs, as a band, with what moves it.
- What the organisation has to put in. Consultancy fails on client capacity more than on consultant quality, and saying so builds more trust than any case study.
- Who this is not for, and what you would suggest instead.
Three pages like that outperform a whole site of capability statements, and they are the pages a buyer forwards to the person who controls the budget.
Engagements, not a logo wall
A row of client logos is the default and it is nearly worthless. It does not say what you did, when, at what scale, or whether it worked, and under a confidentiality agreement half of them probably should not be there at all.
An anonymised engagement description beats a named logo comfortably:
"A £40m turnover manufacturer, family-owned, second generation. Month-end took eleven working days and the board was making decisions on numbers three weeks old. Four months, two days a week. Month-end now closes in four days and the finance team runs it without me."
That has sector, scale, ownership, the symptom, the shape of the engagement, the duration and the outcome. It names nobody and it is far more useful than the logo. It also respects the confidentiality you almost certainly owe.
Where you can name a client and have permission, do — and say when. A consultancy page where the most recent identifiable work is from 2021 reads as a practice that has stopped.
Be a verifiable person
Independent consultancy is bought on the individual, and a surprising number of consultancy sites are written as though a firm of forty existed behind them.
The "we" is usually a mistake. It is transparently one person to anybody reading carefully, and it raises the question of what else is being presented as bigger than it is. A named individual with a real history is a stronger proposition than an imaginary firm, and it is the thing a buyer is actually choosing.
So: your name, a photograph, where you are, what you did before this, how long you have been independent, and the professional memberships or registrations you hold — with numbers where they can be checked. If any title you use is protected by statute, that is a matter worth getting right and there is a separate guide here on it.
The same honesty applies to associates. If you bring in others for larger pieces, say so plainly — it answers the capacity question a buyer is otherwise left to worry about silently.
The biggest keyword in our research is in this sector
Our professional services figures are published in full on the industry page, and they are the strangest distribution of the twenty sectors.
So one sector contains the biggest term we have measured, the hardest, and a completely open one — which is the clearest possible argument that "professional services" is not a market at all. It is a label over several unrelated ones.
Those are terms a studio selling to consultants and professional firms competes for, not terms your buyers use. The lesson that transfers is the one the three figures make unavoidable: measure your own profession rather than your sector, because the sector average describes nobody.
What to check on your own site
- Read your homepage as a stranger. Can you tell what this person would do on Monday?
- Is there a page per problem you solve, named the way a buyer would describe the situation?
- Does each one say what you would actually do, in sequence, with rough durations?
- Is there a cost band, with what moves it?
- Does it say what the client has to put in?
- Does it say who this is not for?
- Have you replaced the logo wall with described engagements — sector, scale, symptom, duration, outcome?
- Is the most recent identifiable work from this year?
- Is it a named person with a photograph and a real history, or an imaginary "we"?
- Are any protected titles you use ones you are entitled to? Separate guide.
- Have you measured search demand for your own profession, rather than assuming the sector figure applies?
The first question is the whole audit. If a stranger cannot answer it, nothing else on the list will save the page.
