The SiteRoot team6 min read
Your name comes up in a meeting you are not in. An operations manager writes it down, and some time that afternoon types it into a browser with four other names in the same tab group.
Here is the part consultants consistently underrate about that moment. That person is not really evaluating you. They are working out whether recommending you to their boss will make them look good. Consulting is bought on borrowed credibility, and your website is where the borrowing happens. Which is why a thin, half finished site does not read as modest or too busy to bother. It reads as risk, and risk is the one thing the person holding your name cannot take on.
The buyer is protecting themselves, not shopping
Understand the internal conversation and every decision about the site gets easier.
Somebody has to walk into a room and say a name. If the engagement goes badly, the person who said the name owns it. So they are looking for material they can repeat: a description of what you do that they can say out loud without fumbling, evidence you have done this before, a real person behind it, and nothing embarrassing.
That is a completely different brief from impressing a peer. It means clarity beats sophistication every time, and specificity beats scale.
Five ways consultancies lose it on their own site
No site, only a profile. A social profile cannot be forwarded to a CFO with a straight face, and for a consultant specifically it carries an unfortunate second reading: that you might be between jobs rather than running a firm.
Language nobody can repeat. We unlock transformation. We partner with organisations on their journey. A buyer reads that and cannot work out what to hire you for, so they hire the person whose site said they fix month end close for mid sized manufacturers.
No evidence. Not one description of a piece of work: what the situation was, what you did, what changed. Without it a prospect has only your adjectives, and everybody has the same adjectives.
No people. No names, no faces, no background. Consulting is a person coming into a business. Hiding the person is the surest way to make the purchase feel less safe.
A site that contradicts the pitch. This is the quiet killer. You sell operational rigour and the contact form does not work. You sell security reviews and your own site has no padlock in the address bar. You sell being current and the footer says 2022 and the last piece of news is a webinar that has happened. Nobody writes any of this down as a reason. They simply pick the other name.
What to write instead of strategic transformation
Write the service the way your buyer would brief it to their own manager.
- We do cloud migrations for businesses of ten to fifty people.
- We fix month end close for finance teams that have outgrown spreadsheets.
- We run a security review before your first client audit asks for one.
Then narrow it, which is the move most consultants are afraid of. Name the industries. Name the company size. Name the situations you are good in. You will worry about turning work away. What actually happens is that people stop guessing, and the enquiries that arrive are the ones you want.
And say what you do not do. Almost nobody does this, and it reads as confidence rather than limitation.
Evidence without inventing a client
You cannot always name clients. You can always describe work.
Three short pieces is plenty. For each one: the situation, what you were asked to do, what you actually did, what changed, and how long it took. Written without the client's name if you do not have permission, with enough shape to be recognisably real.
Do not invent a client, a logo or a quote. Fabricated endorsements are a real legal problem in Australia, not a grey area, and they are also transparent to precisely the kind of careful reader you are trying to win. If a client is happy to be named, ask them in writing and keep the reply.
The boring page procurement will ask for
For anything above a few thousand dollars, somebody in finance or procurement gets involved, and they have a list.
Your entity name and ABN. Whether you carry professional indemnity and public liability cover. Whether you subcontract any of the work. How you invoice and on what terms. Whether you are set up to sign their agreement rather than only your own.
If you hold those things, put them on a page and save everyone the email thread. It is the least interesting page on your website and it removes the most friction.
Rates: say the shape, even if you will not say the number
You do not have to publish a day rate. You do have to give the reader some way to know whether you are in their range, because otherwise the cautious ones simply do not enquire.
Say the shape: fixed scope for defined pieces of work, day rate for advisory, retainer for ongoing support. A minimum engagement size, if you have one. A from price for the thing you sell most. Two sentences here saves a meeting that was never going to work, on both sides.
The forward test
Here is the whole review, and it takes three minutes.
Open your website on your phone. Imagine it has been forwarded to a CFO with the subject line "these guys?" and read only the first screen. Does it say what you do, who you do it for, and who you are? Would you be comfortable if that screen were the only thing they ever saw?
Then tap your phone number, if you have one, and send yourself an enquiry through your own form. A surprising number of consultancies have a contact form that has quietly pointed at a dead mailbox for a year.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
You describe what you do and the site is built around it, in about 15 minutes, free to build, A$16.50 a month including GST if you keep it. alchemist-consulting.siteroot.com.au is a consultancy site we built and published.
The mechanical parts are handled: your own domain, a site that works on a phone rather than one shrunk onto it, an enquiry form that emails you at your own address, and a padlock in the address bar that we watch for expiry along with the site itself. Your services and where you work go onto the site in the form search engines read, and there is a plain file of facts about the business that AI assistants can read directly, which matters more each year given where shortlists now start.
Changing it is a request rather than a project, which is the part that decides whether the case study you finish next month ever makes it onto the site. What we are not is a marketing service, and a website is not one either. It is the thing that has to hold up in the ninety seconds after somebody writes your name down.
