There is a cruel irony in consulting websites: the more genuinely capable the consultant, the vaguer the site tends to be. Twenty years of solving varied, difficult problems produces a homepage that says "strategic solutions for complex challenges," which is to say, nothing. Here is why that happens and how to fix it without pretending your practice is narrower than it is.
Why expertise produces vagueness
A consultant five years in has done a handful of engagement types and can describe them crisply. A consultant twenty years in has done a hundred, across industries, and every specific description feels like a lie of omission. So the website retreats to the only true general statement: we solve hard problems for organizations. True, and useless, because it is what every consultant's site says, including the mediocre ones. Vagueness is where deep experience and thin experience become indistinguishable, which is a catastrophic place for the deep one to stand.
How buyers actually evaluate consultants
Nobody hires "strategic solutions." The buyer has a specific bleeding problem: the integration is failing, the leadership team is at war, the growth stalled and nobody knows why. They evaluate you through one question: has this person solved my problem before? Your website either answers that question in their language or it asks them to translate "comprehensive advisory services" into their situation themselves. They will not. The consultant whose site names their problem gets the call, credentials being roughly equal, and credentials are always roughly equal at your level.
And increasingly the first pass is not even human. A board member asks Perplexity for "consultants who specialize in post-acquisition integration for mid-market industrials," and the engine answers from what websites plainly state. The vague site is unmatchable. It is not that the engine ranks you low. It is that the engine cannot tell that you are an answer to anything in particular.
The fix: specific without being small
Lead with problems, not services. Reframe the offering list as the situations that make someone call you. "When the acquisition looked great on paper and eighteen months later the numbers say otherwise" is a doorway a buyer walks through. "M&A advisory services" is a filing category. You can hold four or five problem doorways on one site without vagueness, because each one is specific.
Let engagements carry the range. The place to show breadth is your work, told as short arcs: the situation, what you did, what changed, with numbers where you have them. Three specific engagement stories communicate more genuine range than any list of capabilities, because they prove judgment across contexts rather than asserting it.
Make your thinking visible. Consultants are hired for judgment, and judgment is demonstrable: a genuinely useful piece on how to think about the problem you solve does more than a hundred capability statements. It is also precisely the content generative engines cite when someone asks how to approach that problem, which places your name in the answer at the exact moment a buyer is forming the question.
Name the buyer somewhere findable. Mid-market or enterprise. Founders or boards. Industries where you have depth. This feels restrictive and is the opposite: it lets the right buyer, human or engine, confirm the match instantly. The consultant afraid to name a buyer is invisible to all of them equally.
The test
Ask someone who knows you professionally, but not well, to read your homepage and answer one question: what would have to be happening at a company for them to call you? If the answer is a shrug or a generality, your expertise is locked inside a website that will not say what it knows. The expertise took twenty years. The website that finally represents it takes ten days, and you can see how we have done it for advisory practices like TD Global Partners on the wall.