A Consultant Site That Says Nothing Specific

The test that fails

Take the site, remove the logo and the name, and hand the text to somebody.

Ask them what this business does and who for.

If they cannot answer, the copy is doing nothing, and this site fails that test comprehensively.

The text would suit a management consultancy, a marketing agency, an IT firm or a coaching practice without changing a word, which means it identifies none of them.

The words in question

Strategic solutions. Transformational outcomes. A partnership approach. Deep expertise. Tailored to your needs. Driving results.

Each of those is a claim with no content, and each appears on thousands of other sites.

They feel professional to write, which is why they persist. They read as filler to anybody evaluating.

The underlying problem is that they describe a posture rather than a service, and a buyer is trying to work out what they would receive.

What is missing

• Who the clients are: size, sector, situation.
• What problem people come with.
• What actually happens during an engagement.
• How long it takes and what it costs.
• What the output is: a report, a system, a trained team.
• Evidence that it has worked before.

The third is the largest gap on most consultancy sites. A buyer cannot picture the engagement, so they cannot judge whether it is worth the money.

A worked example

An operations consultant whose site described helping organisations achieve sustainable improvement through collaborative engagement.

Enquiries were rare and mostly from people who already knew him.

He rewrote it around specifics: he works with manufacturing businesses between twenty and two hundred staff, usually brought in when a company has grown past its processes and is missing delivery dates.

A typical engagement is six to ten weeks, starting with two weeks on site, and costs within a stated range.

The output is a documented process, a trained supervisor, and a set of measures the company runs afterwards.

Enquiries roughly tripled over the following year, and the ones that arrived were from businesses that matched the description.

His observation was that the specific version felt narrower and produced more work, which he had expected to go the other way.

Why specificity feels risky

The fear is real and worth addressing, because it is what keeps these sites vague.

Naming a sector seems to exclude the others. Naming a price seems to lose the buyers who cannot afford it. Describing a method seems to invite comparison.

What happens instead is recognition. A buyer who sees their exact situation described concludes you have solved it before, which is the entire basis on which consultancy is bought.

The generic version does not attract everybody. It attracts nobody, because nobody recognises themselves in it.

And clients outside the named niche still enquire, precisely because a business that is clearly good at something specific reads as competent generally.

The about page

Where a consultancy site should be strongest and is usually weakest.

For a small practice, the person is the product, and a buyer is deciding whether to trust their judgement.

What belongs: what they did before consulting, the actual experience underneath the advice, and a photograph.

What does not: a paragraph about passion for helping organisations, which every competitor also claims.

Somebody who spent fifteen years running production before advising on it should say so in the first line, because that fact does more work than any description of methodology.

The counter-case

Where a degree of generality is appropriate.

A large firm with genuinely broad capability, where the site is an entry point to specific practice areas that carry the detail.

Work under confidentiality where clients cannot be named or described, which constrains examples and does not prevent describing the problem and the process.

And practices whose work arrives entirely by referral at capacity, where the site confirms legitimacy rather than persuades.

Even there, describing what happens in an engagement costs nothing and helps the referred client arrive prepared.

The credentials trap

A related failure that fills the space where specifics should be.

Qualifications, certifications, memberships and years of experience are worth stating and they are not an answer to what do you do.

A buyer reads a list of letters after a name and learns that somebody is qualified, without learning what they would receive.

Credentials belong on the about page, supporting the claim, rather than on the homepage in place of it.

The order that works: what problem you solve, for whom, how, and then why you are qualified to. Reversing it puts the least persuasive material first.

Evidence without naming clients

The practical obstacle, since much consultancy work is confidential.

An anonymised case description works: the sector, the size, the problem, what was done, and what changed, without identifying anybody.

A manufacturer of roughly this size with this problem, over this period, with this outcome, is persuasive and identifies nobody.

Numbers help and do not need to be precise. A stated direction and rough magnitude is more credible than a percentage nobody can verify.

And where a client will be named, ask properly and get it in writing, since a logo used without permission is a poor start to a page about trustworthiness.

The first line

Where this is won or lost, since a proportion of visitors read nothing else.

It should name the audience and the problem in one sentence, in plain words.

Something in the shape of: I help manufacturing businesses that have grown past their processes and are missing delivery dates.

That single line does what four hundred words of capability language attempts. Somebody in that situation recognises themselves; somebody who is not moves on, which is the correct outcome for both.

Writing it is uncomfortable because it forecloses. Every alternative reader you might have attracted is being given up, and the ones remaining are the ones who will actually hire you.

The test for the sentence: could a competitor use it unchanged. If yes, it is not specific enough yet.

What to write instead

1. Who you work with, specifically.
2. The problem they have when they call.
3. What happens week by week.
4. Duration and cost range.
5. What they are left with.
6. Two anonymised examples.

That is a page rather than a site, and it will outperform four pages of capability language written by somebody who was trying not to exclude anybody.

The sixth is what converts the rest from claims into evidence, and two are sufficient. A page of case studies is read less carefully than two that are genuinely detailed.

The same principle applied to trades is covered in describing a service without listing features.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.