Demand here is verification demand. A partner is mentioned in a board meeting, a peer forwards a deck, a former colleague changes companies and remembers who fixed the last integration. What follows is a branded search, a look at the partner biographies, and a quiet decision about whether this firm operates at the level of the problem. The firm's site is not generating that first impulse; it is either confirming or killing it, and that job is worth more than most consulting firms give it credit for.
The unbranded search that does exist is unusually precise. Nobody searches "consulting". They search a capability crossed with a sector or a moment: post-merger integration in a specific industry, operating model redesign, a carve-out, a turnaround, a function that needs rebuilding before a raise. Volume on those terms is small and the value per visit is enormous. A page written for one of those crossings will outperform a generic capabilities page by a distance that has nothing to do with traffic totals.
Then there is the second reader, who is not an executive at all. Procurement, legal and sometimes a board committee will review the firm before an engagement letter goes out. They want to see entity details, insurance posture, where the firm is based, who is actually delivering the work and whether the claims on the site can be substantiated. A site that reads beautifully to a CEO and thinly to a vendor-onboarding analyst stalls at exactly the wrong point in the cycle.
