Consistency is a factual property before it is a design one
Brand consistency is usually discussed as a visual matter: the logo, the colours, whether the social templates match. Those criteria are in this instrument and they are not the ones that produce findings.
The findings come from the factual criteria. A clinic that describes itself as a skin clinic on its website, a cosmetic clinic on one profile and a medispa on another has three descriptions in circulation. A practitioner whose title differs between the website and their professional profile has two accounts of their qualification. A service list that includes something the clinic stopped offering has a fourth version of the business in the world.
These are not aesthetic problems. They are accuracy problems that happen to be visible on branded surfaces, and they matter for the same reason the local discoverability scorecard cares about record consistency: a reader, or a system, has to choose which version to believe.
The visual criteria are included because inconsistent visual presentation makes a small organisation look like several, and because it is usually a symptom of the same underlying cause: no single reference document, so each surface was created by whoever was available from whatever they had to hand.
How to run the audit
Do it in the order a patient encounters you rather than in the order you maintain surfaces. Search for the clinic, open whatever appears, then follow through to the website, then to the social accounts, then to whatever a booking produces.
Record, at each surface, four things: the name as written, the description of what the clinic does, the services listed, and the contact details. Do not correct as you go; collect first. The value is in the comparison.
For practitioners, compare titles across the website, social profiles and any professional listing, and check each against the relevant register as the registration readiness assessment describes. Inconsistency here is both a brand finding and a compliance one.
For visual identity, place screenshots of five surfaces side by side. If a stranger could not tell they belonged to one organisation, score criterion five 0.
For tone, read three pieces written for the same audience by different people. Marked differences in register score 0.
Common scoring errors
Auditing only the surfaces you maintain. Third-party listings are where the previous version of your clinic lives.
Scoring the description criterion loosely. Different words are acceptable; describing a different business is not. The test is whether a reader would conclude they are the same clinic doing the same things.
Treating a title difference as cosmetic. Where a title implies a qualification, it is a substantive claim and belongs in the compliance instruments too.
Confusing variety with inconsistency. Social posts may differ in format without differing in account. The criteria concern what is said about the clinic, not whether every post looks identical.
Scoring the reference document as existing because a designer supplied guidelines. Criterion ten asks for a document covering name, description, services, identity and tone, and most visual guidelines cover only one of those five.
Writing the reference document
The output of this audit should be one document, two or three pages long, that everybody uses. It does not need a designer.
It should contain: the trading name written exactly as it should always appear; a one-sentence description of what the clinic does; a longer paragraph version; the current service list; the practitioner list with titles as verified; the canonical contact details; the logo files; the colours and typefaces; three sentences describing the tone with an example of what is and is not right; and the date it was last reviewed.
Then reconcile every surface against it, starting with the ones you control and moving to those you do not. Third-party listings usually take longest because access has to be recovered first.
Attach the document to the process for creating anything new. The most common cause of drift is a new surface created quickly from whatever the creator had, and a reference document removes that failure entirely.
Re-audit after any change of name, premises, practitioner or service list. Those four are the events that invalidate the document, and each of them tends to be handled by somebody who is not thinking about brand consistency at the time.