Most independent consultant websites are CV pages with better fonts.
That’s not me being snarky. It’s the structural pattern. Open the homepage, and you’ll get the consultant’s name, their title, the firms they used to work for, the qualifications they hold, and a list of “areas of focus.” Click About, and there’s another version of the same thing in long form.
The site is doing one job well. Confirming the consultant exists and is qualified. It’s doing nothing else.
For a consultant whose pipeline is 80% referrals, that might be enough. The site exists for the moment when a warm referral runs your name through Google, sees a tidy LinkedIn-shaped page, and decides you’re real.
But for any consultant trying to grow past pure referrals, a website that only confirms existence is a ceiling. It can’t open conversations. It can’t filter the wrong-fit prospects out before they reach your inbox. It can’t carry weight on a cold outreach campaign or in an introduction to a buyer who doesn’t know you yet.
Here’s what’s needed to move it from CV to working sales tool.
Lead with the buyer, not the bio
The headline on most consulting websites is the consultant’s name and a string of credentials.
That works for the audience that already knows you. It does very little for the audience you’re trying to reach.
Replace the headline with one that names the buyer’s situation. Not the buyer’s job title. The situation they’re in when they need someone like you.
“For finance directors handling a first acquisition with no in-house M&A experience.”
“For founders three years into scaling, where the operating model is starting to crack.”
The buyer reading that headline knows immediately whether they’re in the room you’re describing. The credentials still matter. They can come a paragraph or two later, where they prove the headline rather than replace it.
State a position, not a service
A consultant who lists every service (“strategy, change management, organisational design, transformation”) is competing on length, not on substance. The buyer can’t tell what you actually believe, only what you’ll sell.
A working consulting site has a position. A specific view of how the work should be done that you’ll defend.
“Operating models fail more often because of unclear accountability than because of bad strategy. Most of my work starts there.”
That sentence loses some traffic. The traffic it keeps is exactly the traffic you want. A buyer who agrees nods and books a call. A buyer who disagrees moves on, which is also useful, because they would have wasted your time on the call anyway.
Position beats service list, every time, on a consulting site.
Put the engagement model in plain sight
Most consultants leave the structure of an engagement vague on the website, then get into specifics on the call.
That’s defensible. It’s also slower than it needs to be.
A short section called “How I work” or “What an engagement looks like,” three or four lines, no jargon, does most of the qualifying work before the buyer ever rings. Day rate, project shape, typical duration, whether you take retainers, whether you cap scope. If the buyer reads that and knows it isn’t for them, they don’t book the call. That’s a win.
The consultants who try to keep this opaque usually do it because they want to negotiate later. The cost is most of the buyers self-selecting out before the call ever happens, except they’ve selected out by simply not getting in touch.
Use real engagement examples, not anonymised case studies
A consulting case study that says “Worked with a global manufacturer to redesign their procurement function, saving £2m” is no longer credible. There’s too much of it. Too many real examples and too many invented examples have been written in the same shape, and the buyer can’t tell them apart.
Real engagement examples have specifics. The shape of the company. The triggering event. The two or three things you actually did. The decision the client took afterwards. Even one or two well-told examples, with permission to use the client’s name, do more work than five anonymised vignettes.
If naming the client isn’t possible, name the situation. “FTSE 250 services group, post-merger integration, six-month engagement” is more useful than “global FTSE company, multi-million-pound saving.”
Drop the stock photography
Stock photography on a consulting website is the single fastest way to look indistinguishable from every competitor on the same shortlist.
Two hands shaking over a contract. A man in a suit pointing at a graph. A diverse team laughing in front of a glass wall. Buyers have stopped seeing these images entirely. When they do see them, they read them as filler.
A photo of you. A photo of a real diagram you actually use in client work. A photo of a book on your desk. Even no images at all, with strong typography. All of those are better than stock.
This is small but it’s a credibility leak that compounds with every other small leak on the page.
Make the call shape explicit
Most consulting sites end the homepage with “Get in touch” and a contact form.
Better: “Book a 30-minute introductory call. No charge. We’ll talk about your situation, I’ll tell you whether I think I can help, and if not, I’ll point you to someone who probably can.”
That paragraph does three things. It tells the buyer what the call is. It removes the price worry. It signals that you’re prepared to disqualify yourself, which is the single fastest way to build trust with a senior buyer who is used to being sold to.
A vague “let’s chat” is a wall. A specific, named, time-boxed offer with the disqualification baked in is a door.
A note on writing
Most independent consulting sites are written by the consultant, in their own voice, late at night between client work. That’s normal. It’s also why they often sound formal in places they shouldn’t.
The fix is to write the site the way you’d talk to a buyer in the first 90 seconds of a call. Not the way you’d write a board paper. The two are different registers, and a consulting website written in board-paper register reads like a wall to most buyers under it.
If you’ve read this and recognised your own site in any of the points above, the fix is rarely a full redesign. It’s the words, the order, and a willingness to take a position on the page rather than waiting to take it on the call.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your consulting website, book a 20-minute call. I’ll go through it section by section and tell you what’s earning its keep and what’s costing you enquiries.
