Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Consultant

🎯 Role Definition

A Web Consultant partners with marketing, product, and engineering teams to define and deliver website strategy, architecture, and ongoing optimization. This role blends technical web expertise (CMS, front-end, integrations, performance), digital marketing (SEO, CRO, content strategy), analytics (GA4, events, attribution), and consultancy skills (roadmaps, stakeholder management, vendor selection) to improve user experience, increase traffic and conversions, and reduce operational risk. The Web Consultant acts as a trusted advisor to drive measurable business outcomes from web properties and digital channels.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Digital Marketing Specialist
Front-End Developer or Web Developer
SEO / Analytics Specialist

Advancement To:

Senior Web Consultant / Lead Web Consultant
Digital Product Manager or Head of Digital Experience
Director of Web Strategy, Head of Conversion Optimization

Lateral Moves:

UX / Product Designer
Technical Project Manager (Digital)
Digital Marketing Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own comprehensive website strategy and roadmaps that align with business objectives, channel strategies, and conversion goals, providing prioritized recommendations for short- and long-term initiatives.
Conduct full website audits covering SEO, technical performance, accessibility (WCAG), UX heuristics, content quality, analytics tagging, and security to identify gaps and define remediation plans.
Lead discovery and requirements workshops with stakeholders to translate business needs into user stories, functional and technical requirements, acceptance criteria, and prioritization for the product backlog.
Design and oversee implementation of search engine optimization programs including on-page optimization, technical SEO (sitemaps, robots, canonicalization), schema markup, crawl budget management, and migration planning.
Architect and recommend CMS strategies (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Contentful, or headless CMS) including content modeling, governance, workflows, and vendor selection to ensure scalability and maintainability.
Plan and execute conversion rate optimization programs including funnel analysis, persona mapping, hypothesis generation, A/B and multivariate testing, and statistical analysis to drive measurable uplifts in key metrics.
Implement and validate analytics and measurement frameworks (Google Analytics 4, server-side tagging, GA4 event models, e-commerce tracking, attribution models) to enable accurate reporting and decision-making.
Manage tagging and data-layer design using Google Tag Manager (or Tag Manager alternatives), ensuring consistent event taxonomy, data quality monitoring, and governance across environments.
Optimize site performance through front-end audits, leveraging lazy loading, resource minimization, caching strategies, CDN configuration, and performance budgets to improve Core Web Vitals and time-to-interactive.
Lead accessibility initiatives by auditing against WCAG standards, recommending remediation patterns, setting accessibility requirements for development sprints, and validating fixes across assistive technologies.
Provide technical guidance on front-end technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, modern frameworks like React/Vue), advising engineering teams on best practices for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.
Manage commerce and platform integrations including payment gateways, inventory systems, recommendation engines, loyalty platforms, and CRM or ERP synchronization to ensure data integrity and seamless user experiences.
Develop and maintain SEO-friendly content strategy and editorial governance, advising content teams on keyword targeting, content silos, internal linking, metadata standards, and content lifecycle management.
Create and own diagnostic dashboards, KPI definitions, and regular executive reporting that communicates impact, ROI, test results, and prioritized next steps aligned to business outcomes.
Serve as the subject matter expert during website redesigns or platform migrations, creating migration plans, preserving SEO value, redirect strategies, and launch readiness checklists.
Run performance monitoring and incident post-mortems for web availability, security incidents, and regression in key metrics; recommend fixes and process changes to avoid recurrence.
Provide hands-on support and technical reviews for front-end code, templates, and CMS configurations when needed to accelerate delivery and ensure adherence to standards.
Advise on privacy and compliance considerations (GDPR, CCPA, cookie consent management) and partner with legal and security teams to ensure data handling and tracking are compliant.
Lead vendor evaluations and RFPs for third-party tools (analytics platforms, testing tools, tag management, personalization engines), defining requirements, scoring proposals, and onboarding selected vendors.
Coach and train internal teams — content authors, marketers, product owners, analysts, and developers — on web best practices, SEO fundamentals, analytics interpretation, and A/B testing methodologies.
Define and govern deployment processes and release checklists for web changes, coordinating cross-functional sign-off, QA, performance and accessibility validations, and rollback plans.
Support agile delivery by participating in sprint planning, backlog grooming, estimation, and acceptance testing; act as product owner proxy for web-specific initiatives.
Maintain a roadmap of technical debt cleanup and modernization tasks (refactoring templates, consolidating components, reducing plugins) and advocate for investment to reduce cost and risk.
Advise on personalization, recommendation logic, and customer segmentation to enable targeted experiences that drive engagement and lifetime value.
Conduct competitive benchmarking and industry research to surface new trends, technologies, and growth opportunities that could be applied to the organization’s web properties.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist marketing teams with campaign landing page strategy, tracking setup, and post-campaign analysis.
Provide subject matter expertise for cross-functional workshops, board presentations, and partner integrations.
Maintain documentation repositories: measurement plans, CMS guidelines, SEO playbooks, and release notes.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Search Engine Optimization (technical SEO, on-page, off-page, structured data, migrations)
Web analytics and measurement (Google Analytics 4, GA4 event tracking, BigQuery, dataLayer design)
Tag management (Google Tag Manager, server-side tagging, tag governance)
Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B testing platforms (Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize or equivalents)
Content Management Systems (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Contentful, headless CMS architectures)
Front-end fundamentals (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript) and familiarity with modern frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js)
Performance optimization (Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, CDN configuration, caching strategies)
Accessibility standards and testing (WCAG, ARIA, screen reader testing)
E-commerce platforms and integrations (Shopify, Magento, commercetools) and payment gateway experience
API and third-party integrations (RESTful APIs, webhooks, CRM/ERP/marketing automation integration)
SEO and content tools (Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb)
SQL and basic data querying for analytics validation and reporting
Privacy & compliance tooling (cookie consent managers, GTM privacy controls, GDPR/CCPA awareness)
Version control and basic dev workflow knowledge (Git, CI/CD pipelines, release checklists)

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management and executive communication — able to translate technical implications into business impact
Analytical and strategic thinking with a data-driven mindset
Excellent written and verbal communication; able to write clear measurement plans and requirements
Project and time management — ability to juggle multiple initiatives and prioritize by ROI
Collaborative team player who can work across product, marketing, design, and engineering teams
Coaching and enablement skills to upskill internal teams on best practices
Problem-solving mindset and pragmatic decision-making under ambiguity
Customer-centric approach with empathy for user experience and accessibility needs

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Digital Marketing, Communications, Business, or related field — or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with additional certifications in Analytics (GA4), SEO, UX, or Project Management (PMP, Agile/Scrum).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Information Technology
Digital Marketing / Communications
Human-Computer Interaction / UX Design
Business / Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years of progressive experience in web consulting, digital strategy, front-end development, SEO, analytics, or related roles.

Preferred:

5+ years in a client-facing web consultancy or in-house digital strategy role with demonstrable outcomes (traffic growth, conversion lifts, platform migrations).
Proven track record of leading cross-functional web initiatives, performing site migrations without organic traffic loss, implementing GA4 and server-side tagging, and running structured A/B testing programs.