I spent a decent chunk of my career at Google working with over 100 small and medium-sized business (SMBs) partners, and then went independent myself. The most common problem I see on an independent consultant's website is not bad design. It is a website that could belong to any of forty other people.
Three mistakes account for most of it. None of them require a rebuild to fix.
Mistake 1: You are describing your skills, not your buyer's problem
Here is the sentence, in one of its forty variations: "I provide strategic advisory across operations, growth, and transformation for organisations at every stage."
That sentence describes what you are good at. It tells a buyer nothing about whether you can help them, because they do not experience their situation as a need for strategic advisory. They experience it as "sales keeps promising delivery dates operations cannot hit and it is costing us repeat customers."
The fix is to name the buyer and the situation, in that order. "I help Canadian manufacturers under $20M in revenue close the gap between what sales promises and what operations can deliver." That sentence loses you nobody who was ever going to hire you, and it gets forwarded.
There is a test for this that takes ten seconds. Copy the first sentence of your homepage and imagine it on a competitor's website. If it would sit there unchanged and nobody would notice, it is not positioning. It is decoration.
Mistake 2: You have no niche, because you are afraid of turning work away
This is the same mistake as the first one, but it lives in your head rather than on your website, which is why fixing the copy alone never works.
The fear is reasonable and the arithmetic is wrong. A narrow position does not reduce the work available to you, it increases the number of people who can recommend you. Nobody refers "a really good consultant." There is nothing to hang it on. People refer "the person who sorts out X for Y-type companies," because that sentence survives being repeated by someone who does not fully understand your work.
I resisted this for about a year longer than I should have, on the theory that saying no to work was a luxury for people with more of it. It turns out to be the reverse. Vagueness does not keep your options open. It makes you expensive to recommend, which is the only marketing channel that reliably works when you are one person.
You do not have to niche by industry. You can niche by problem, by company stage, by situation, or by the specific transition you are good at. What you cannot do is niche by nothing and expect the phone to ring.
Mistake 3: You have real proof and you are not showing it
Almost every experienced consultant I meet has delivered results they can describe precisely, and displays none of them. There are usually three reasons, and two of them are solvable.
Non-disclosure agreements. Real constraint, but narrower than people assume. It usually restricts naming the client, not describing the work.
Nobody asked. Most clients say yes when asked directly, and are mildly flattered. The ask has to come while the result is fresh, not eighteen months later.
Modesty. Understandable, and it is quietly costing you work. A specific, true number is not bragging. It is the information your buyer needs to decide.
So, practically: anonymize rather than omit. "A Canadian logistics firm, 40 staff, 18 percent reduction in order errors within one quarter" is publishable in most situations where a client name is not, and it does nearly all of the same work. Keep the number and the time-frame. Those are what make it credible.
And then the rule with no exceptions: never invent one. Not a composite, not an illustrative example, not a plausible-sounding placeholder while you wait for a real one. A prospect who checks and finds nothing has learned something about you that no amount of good work will undo.
Public reviews carry more of this load than consultants expect. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 adults found 97 percent read reviews when evaluating a local business, and 80 percent are more likely to use a business that replies to all of them (sourced from BrightLocal). Read this as direction rather than a statistic, but the direction is not subtle. If asking feels awkward, here is how to ask without making it weird.
One more thing, before you email that list
Almost every consultant who fixes their positioning immediately wants to tell people about it, usually by email, usually to a list assembled from conference badges and LinkedIn. In Canada, that is regulated, and the rules bind you whether or not you knew about them.
Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) requires three things of every commercial electronic message you send.
Consent, express or implied. Implied consent from a business address is real but conditional. The address must have been conspicuously published, without any statement saying the person does not want unsolicited messages, and your message must be relevant to that person's business role or duties (sourced from the CRTC). A business card in a fishbowl is not conspicuous publication.
Clear identification. You have to identify yourself, and anyone on whose behalf the message is sent. A hyperlink to those details is acceptable if the page is readily accessible at no cost.
A working unsubscribe mechanism. It must stay valid for at least 60 days after the message goes out, and once someone uses it you have to process it without delay and no later than 10 business days (sourced from the CRTC).
This is general guidance and not legal advice. For anything consequential, particularly if you are building a list at any scale, talk to counsel. But the short version is that a small, properly consented list you can prove is worth considerably more than a large one you cannot.
Start here
Open your own homepage and read the first sentence out loud. Could the consultant you most respect and the consultant you least respect have both written it? If so, that is the thing to fix first, and it costs nothing but an afternoon of being honest with yourself about who you are actually for.
What would yours say instead?