How do you build a consulting website that not only looks great but actually helps you get more consulting clients?

I’m sure you’ve seen lists of the “best” consulting websites created by web designers. You might have even been impressed by how these websites look.

Here’s the truth…

In 2023, building a good-looking consulting website isn’t difficult. Any web designer from Fiverr can help you build a professional-looking consulting website.

The challenge is building a consulting website that serves a marketing purpose: to help you generate visibility in your marketplace, positions you as the expert you are, and creates more meaningful conversations with your ideal clients.

Here’s the good news: starting your consulting website can be simple.

We’ve had many consultants inside our Clarity Coaching Program start with a simple 1-page website that conveys their Magnetic Message, some testimonials, case studies, and a bio. And this simple website has helped them market their business.

That means you don’t need to wait to have the perfect high-end website right away. Launch your ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) of your consulting website, and then improve it after it’s live.

The rest of this article will show you exactly how to do that. I’ll cover:

• The 5 steps to building a consulting website
• Consulting website best practices
• Successful consulting website examples
• How to get help with your consulting website (& overall marketing strategy)

You don’t need to wait to have the perfect high-end website right away. Launch your ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) of your consulting website, and then improve it after it’s live.

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Note: Use our Consulting Website Template Kit to follow our step-by-step system to write, design, and launch a lead-generating consulting website.

5 Steps To Build A Consulting Website

As a consultant selling your expertise, your consulting website is different from someone selling products.

The goal of your consulting website is to get your ideal clients interested in your services and expertise so that they reach out to learn more.

Here’s how to build a consulting website that achieves this:

1. Understand Your Ideal Client

An effective consulting website targets a specific person: the ideal client you’d like to work with.

So, if you’re not clear about your ideal client before setting up your consulting website, your website will lack focus. You’ll end up with a scattered, generic, and uncompelling consulting website.

Before you even think about building a consulting website, you must deeply understand who your website is for: your ideal client (not you).

• For example, Nic Campbell works with nonprofit and philanthropic organizations.
• Jason Fearnow works with mining companies and executives.
• Husain Shekhani works with companies in the ultrasonic device industry.

If you look at these consultant’s websites, you’ll see that their website is written for their ideal client profile.

The key here is specificity. The more specific your ideal client, the more compelling your website will be.

2. Write Your Website Copy

After you understand your ideal client, you’re ready to write your website copy.

“Copy” refers to the messaging on your website written to entice your reader (your ideal client) to reach out to you.

I recommend writing your website copy before you design and build your website.

Why?

Your copy is the most important aspect of your consulting website. It’s the copy and messaging that will persuade your ideal client to reach out to you, not a fancy design.

(Inside our Clarity Coaching Program, we have website templates for consultants that will help you write and build your consulting website with ease)

Writing is the most challenging part of creating an effective consulting website.

You don’t have to write it all yourself, but you should influence the overall direction and tone of your website copy.

If you’re not a strong writer, hire a copywriter who has experience writing copy for consulting businesses or professional services.

You can start with 1 page of copy that communicates your…

• Magnetic Message
• Social Proof (logos, testimonials, case studies)
• Consulting Offers
• Mission & Values

Once you have that ready, you can start to design and build your consulting website.

3. Design & Build Your Consulting Website

Once you’ve finished your website copy, you’re ready to put it all together into a compelling consulting website.

If you’re not a designer, you’ll get the best results by giving your copy to a web designer to build your website for you.

During this process, your web designer will make your copy and your brand come to life.

They’ll make it all come together into a visually compelling website that makes it easy for your ideal clients to understand who you are, what you do, and why they should speak with you.

Common website builders for consultants include Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. We use and recommend WordPress. WordPress makes it easy to build and manage a great-looking consulting website. It also gives you plenty of themes to choose from (like X Theme) so you can design your website to match your brand.

Your role here is to guide your designer to make a website consulting website that’s compelling not only to you or them — but that’s compelling to your ideal clients.

4. Launch Your “Minimum Viable Website”

Whether you’re going with a simple one-pager to start or a complete consulting website, you want to launch your consulting website when it’s “good enough.”

Far too often I see consultants toying around with their website, bogged down by perfectionism.

You’re probably not going to get a flood of inquiries as soon as you launch your website. It’s going to take time.

So, get the basics of your consulting website down, and then launch it.

An effective consulting website isn’t static. It’s something that you iterate and improve upon as you get honest feedback from the market.

You can always add articles, case studies, and a lead magnet after you launch the website.

So take imperfect action and launch your website sooner rather than later.

5. Market, Market, Market!

If you thought launching your consulting website was the end, think again.

Launching your consulting website is when the real work begins.

This is where you start to market your consulting website.

Ideally, you’re fitting the site into your “marketing engine” — your marketing system that gets you in front of your ideal clients.

You’ve already been reaching out to your ideal clients directly.

Now that you have a website, you can begin creating authority-building content: your expertise and insights that provide value to your ideal clients.

You can also start doing search engine optimization: optimizing your website and content so that you rank highly on search engines like Google.

Your outreach efforts will be much more effective when you combine them with valuable, thought-provoking content.

When you combine outreach, follow-up, and authority-building, your marketing will be effective and fulfill its purpose: to build relationships with your ideal clients and to create conversations with them.

It takes a while (and lots of thought-leadership content) for your website to start generating inquiries for you. In the meantime, use it as a tool to make your outreach more compelling.

With these steps in mind, let’s go over some consulting website best practices to help you maximize your website’s potential.

If you’re not clear about your ideal client before setting up your consulting website, your website will lack focus. You’ll end up with a scattered, generic, and uncompelling consulting website.

7 Consulting Website Best Practices

Now that you have the 5 steps to build your consulting website, I’ll share with you several best practices to make your website even more effective.

1. Choose The Right Website Builder

The last thing you want is a consulting website that’s difficult for you to use. At the very least, you want to be comfortable using your website to publish thought-leadership content: articles, videos, podcasts, etc.

You can and should delegate this eventually, but the primary purpose of your website is to share what you know and provide value. For that reason, we use and recommend WordPress. Besides being a website builder, it’s a Content Management System (CMS). It’s designed to help you manage your content.

2. Don’t Build It Yourself

If you’re not a professional designer, and you design your own consulting website, it will be obvious. Once you’ve written your website copy, we recommend handing the design over to a professional.

That being said, you don’t have to break the budget to get a professional design for your website. You can hire great talent on Upwork and Fiverr. Look for a designer who has experience with consulting websites (or professional services websites).

3. Make It About Your Client, Not You

Far too often I see consultants whose entire website is about them. And then they wonder why prospective clients aren’t reaching out.

Instead of making your website about you, make it about your client. Talk about them: their challenges, their objections, their frustrations, the results they want, and their desired future state. Make it read like a page out of their diary. Show your ideal clients you understand them, what they’re dealing with now, and where they want to be.

Once you’ve accomplished that, then you can talk about yourself as the “bridge” that can take them from where they are now, to where they want to be.

4. Leverage All The Social Proof You Can

There’s nothing wrong with boasting about how great you are and all of the amazing results you’ve achieved for your clients. You should do that.

However, you should back it all up with social proof: credibility factors that back up what you say about yourself. That means case studies, testimonials, recommendations, logos of clients you’ve worked with, logos of organizations where you’ve been featured — anything you can think of that helps make the case for your expertise and authority.

5. Use It To Publish Thought Leadership

Your consulting website is more than a mere digital brochure. When we tell consultants to actually USE their website, we mean for them to use it to share what they know.

We’ve been publishing in-depth content on our blog for over 13 years. And that’s why we’re known as the go-to source for useful information on starting, growing, and scaling a consulting business. Why not do the same in your business? What could you become the go-to consultant for?

It’s not going to happen by accident. It’s going to happen by you sharing what you know, over and over, until your consulting website becomes a valuable source of information for your ideal clients.

6. Make It Easy For Prospects To Book A Call

What do you want your website to do for you? If you’re like most consultants, you’d love it if your website could send you just a couple of calls per month. If you want it to do that, make it simple for prospects to book a call.

Forget about the complex contact form with no clear directions or instructions. Create a page where you offer a free consultation that makes it easy for them to book a call at a time that works best for them in a few clicks. And sell them on why they should take 30 minutes out of their day to have that call with you.

7. Grow Your Email List

Here’s another well-kept secret: most of the clients you get online won’t come through your website — they will come through your email list. As a consultant, your email list is the most important marketing asset you have.

There’s no other marketing method that enables you to reach out to prospective clients who’ve signed up to hear from you, right in their email inbox — at scale.

The secondary goal of your consulting website is to funnel prospective clients toward booking a call with you. And the primary goal is to get them onto your list. The best way to do that is with a lead magnet: offering them something of value in exchange for their name and email address. Once you begin using your consulting website to build up your email list, that’s when you’ll realize its true marketing and sales potential.

Next, I’ll share some specific examples that embody these best practices.

Your consulting website is more than a mere digital brochure. When we tell consultants to actually USE their website, we mean for them to use it to share what they know.

3 Successful Consultant Website Examples

The following examples are from Clarity Coaching clients whose websites actively help them win consulting clients.

1. People Spark Consulting

2. Bluprint Partners

3. Alphanova Consulting

 

Get Help With Your Consulting Website (& Entire Marketing Strategy)

Looking for help with your consulting website?

There’s a lot that goes into writing, designing, building, and marketing a consulting website — especially when you want to use it to help you get clients.

In our consulting community, we have experts who specialize in copywriting, web design, and digital marketing specifically for consulting business owners.

And we teach an entire section on marketing (which includes in-depth tutorials and templates) in our Clarity Coaching Program.

In our Clarity Coaching program, we’ve helped over 1000 consultants to build a more strategic, profitable, and scalable, consulting business.

Learn More About Clarity Coaching

We’ll work hands-on with you to develop a strategic plan and then dive deep and work through your ideal client clarity, strategic messaging, consulting offers, fees and pricing, business model optimization, and help you to set up your marketing engine and lead generation system to consistently attract ideal clients.

You’ll learn how to make more money with every project you take on — and how to land more clients than ever before. Learn more about Clarity Coaching and get in touch to talk about your situation and goals.