Voice consistency audit

What a voice consistency audit is

A voice consistency audit is a reading of everything your business publishes, across every channel, to find where it disagrees with itself. It lists each contradiction with the two quotes that prove it, groups them by kind, and puts them in the order worth fixing. The result is a short report and a spreadsheet, not a rewrite.

It is not a content audit, which judges what each page is earning and whether it should exist. A content audit might keep a page the voice audit flags, and the two are often run together on an older site.

When you need one

Three situations. Several people or suppliers have written for you over the years and you suspect, but cannot show, that the material no longer sounds like one company. You are about to write voice guidelines or a messaging framework and want to know the real starting point. Or a customer, a new hire or a partner has said something like "your website says one thing and your quote says another", and you want the full list before deciding what to do.

If you already know the writing is inconsistent and you know which pages, skip the audit and go to voice alignment, which does the rewriting. And if the material is one long document rather than a site, consistency editing is cheaper.

What gets looked at

Every channel you publish in, up to an agreed count of pieces per channel: the website, the proposal and quote templates, the email templates and the last few months of sent newsletters, the social accounts, printed material, and anything else customers read, including the invoice footer and the voicemail script if you have one. You send what is not public; I collect what is.

Each piece is read for the same set of things, and each contradiction found is recorded with both quotes and where they came from.

• Claims. Places where two pieces say different things about what you do, who it is for, how long it takes or what it costs.
• Names. Your own products, plans, services and departments called by different names, capitalised differently or described differently.
• Tone. Formality, warmth and confidence jumping between pieces meant for the same reader in the same situation.
• Person and address. "We" on one page, "the company" on the next, "I" in the emails.
• Mechanics. Spelling conventions, numbers, dates and punctuation habits, recorded but ranked last, because they matter least to a buyer.

What you get

The contradiction log. One spreadsheet, one row per contradiction, with the two quotes, their locations, the kind of contradiction, how visible it is to a buyer, and a suggested resolution. Sortable by kind and by visibility.

The report. Four to eight pages. It opens with the five contradictions a buyer is most likely to notice and what to do about each. Then the pattern: which channel drifts most, which writer or supplier the drift traces to, and what the material has in common when it is at its best, because that is the voice worth keeping. It ends with a fix order and an honest note on whether you need guidelines, a one-page word list, or just an afternoon of corrections.

A forty-five-minute call. Walking through the report with whoever will act on it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A dental clinic with two locations has a website written by an agency, a patient email series written by the office manager, social posts by a part-time coordinator, and printed welcome packs from before the second location opened. The audit reads 38 web pages, 14 emails, 60 posts and the pack. It logs 71 contradictions.

The ones that matter: the website calls the same hygiene visit three different names and quotes two different durations for it; the emails address patients as "you" while the welcome pack calls them "the patient"; the social account promises same-week appointments that the booking page does not offer; and the second location is missing from the pack and from nine web pages. The report puts the appointment promise first, because it is a claim a patient can test, the visit names second, and the spelling of the clinic's own name, which appears in two forms, third. The recommendation is a one-page word list and a morning of corrections, not a full guide.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish, who writes it, and what prompted the question. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Channels and piece counts agreed, and the price, before anything starts.
3. Collection. You send the templates, emails and print that are not public. I collect the rest. Two or three days.
4. The reading. Five to eight working days for a business with up to about 150 pieces across all channels. Larger sets are quoted after the call.
5. The walkthrough. The report and the log arrive the day before the call, so you can read them cold first.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and not changed without your agreement. The price depends on the number of channels and the number of pieces in each; a small site with one email template is a different job from two locations with four years of newsletters. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works.

What happens next

Most businesses fix the top five themselves from the log. If the drift traces to having no written voice, brand voice guidelines stop it recurring, and the audit's reading is reused, so the guidelines cost less. Where the contradictions are in the claims rather than the tone, a messaging framework settles them. The pages that need rewriting go to page rewrites.