Why one page at a time
Site-wide content audits produce a spreadsheet nobody reads. The reason is that content quality is not a property of a site; it is a property of a page, and the aggregate hides the variation that matters. A clinic with fourteen treatment pages typically has two excellent ones, written when somebody cared, and twelve written to fill a menu.
Scoring one page at a time is slower and produces something usable: a specific page with specific missing sections and a specific person who can write them. It also lets a clinic sequence properly, starting with the procedure it most wants to perform rather than with whichever page appears first alphabetically.
The twelve criteria are ordered roughly as a reader encounters the questions. That ordering is useful when a page scores badly overall, because it tells you where the page stops being useful. A page that scores well on the first four criteria and collapses afterwards is a page that describes the procedure and then starts selling.
The rubric deliberately gives equal weight to criteria that help the sale and criteria that hinder it. Exclusions, risks and alternatives carry the same three points as the description of results. A clinic that finds this balance unreasonable has learned something about its own page.
How to score a page
Print the page, or read it in a reading mode that strips navigation. You are assessing what the page says, not how it looks.
Read it once through without scoring. Then score each criterion against its descriptor, marking the specific sentence that justifies each score of 2 or 3. If you cannot point at a sentence, the score is 1 at most. This single discipline prevents most inflation.
Score exclusions and risks against the clinic's own consent documentation. If the consent form names complications the page does not, the page scores 0 on that row regardless of how carefully it is written, because the clinic has demonstrated it knows something it chose not to publish.
Have a non-clinician score the same page independently. Clinicians reliably over-score the description criteria, because they read what the page implies to a trained reader. Non-clinicians reliably under-score risk criteria, because unfamiliar terms read as more alarming than they are. The disagreement is the useful part.
Record the total, the date and the page address. Twelve criteria give a maximum of 36.
Common scoring errors
Crediting a linked consent form. The criterion asks what the page says. A link to a document the reader will not open before enquiring does not satisfy it.
Scoring risk coverage by word count. Three named complications with the clinic's response scores higher than four paragraphs of general caution.
Treating a price on a separate page as absent. If the treatment page links directly to a specific figure for this procedure, score 2. Reserve 0 for the case where no figure exists anywhere.
Scoring "results vary" as a statement of limits. It is a disclaimer. A statement of limits says what the procedure will not achieve.
Scoring the page you are about to publish. Score the live page. The improved version can be scored when it exists, and the comparison is the point.
Using the rubric as an editorial standard
The most useful thing a clinic can do with this rubric is stop using it as an audit and start using it as a specification. A page written against the twelve criteria from the beginning takes about the same time to write as a page written from a competitor's page, and it does not need auditing afterwards.
Give the rubric to whoever writes your pages, internal or external, as the acceptance condition. A supplier who receives twelve written criteria before starting produces something different from a supplier who receives a word count and a list of phrases to include. It also makes acceptance a matter of scoring rather than of opinion, which removes the most common argument in clinic marketing.
Pair it with two other instruments. The claim substantiation checklist asks whether each statement on the page can be supported, which the rubric does not test. The advertising compliance self-audit asks whether the page is permissible, which is a different question again and the one with regulatory consequences.
Re-score a page when the technique changes, when the product changes, when the price changes, or annually. Pages age quietly, and a page describing a device the clinic replaced eighteen months ago is a common and avoidable finding.