The 40-Point Brand Audit I Run Before Any Redesign

A brand audit is a list of yes-or-no questions about every place a customer meets your business, scored so you know what to fix first. This is the 40-point version I run before any redesign in 2026, and it is the brand side of the brand and marketing audits WBX Creative sells; the funnel and ad-account side is a separate list. Run it yourself in an afternoon and you will know whether you need a new logo, a new website, or a phone number corrected in eleven places.

I ran the website and search groups on my own studio site on the morning of September 22, 2026. Seven of sixteen public pages shared one title, there was no sitemap or robots file, a search for the site surfaced only the about page and a subdomain, and none of the 185 portfolio items had a description. The case study has the full list. A redesign would have painted over all of it.

How to think about it

Consistency is the whole game, and it is measured by customers, not designers. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey of 47 experts (published November 6, 2025) weights the local pack at 32 percent Google Business Profile, 20 percent reviews, 15 percent on-page, 9 percent behavioral, 8 percent links, and 6 percent citations. That is why ten of these forty points are about search and reviews and only five are about the logo. Lucidpress, now Marq, surveyed 400-plus organizations for its "State of Brand Consistency" report; the figures quoted from it in secondary roundups are 81 percent admitting to off-brand content and about a quarter enforcing their guidelines. Those are self-reported, so treat them as confessions, not measurements.

Scoring is simple. Each item is one point, pass or fail, for a total of 40. Ten items are marked critical because failing them loses a customer today. Bands: 34 to 40, tidy, fix the stragglers; 25 to 33, fix the criticals this week and plan the rest; below 25, the redesign conversation is premature until the criticals are gone. The order of work is always criticals first, then anything that appears on more than one surface, then the rest.

Do it with a phone in one hand, a business card from a drawer in the other, and a walk to the parking lot. Audit the thing in the world, not the design file.

1. Identity files

1. A vector master exists and you can find it in 60 seconds. AI, EPS, or SVG. A JPG from an old email fails. Critical.
2. Three layouts. Horizontal, stacked, and icon-only, as separate files.
3. Three color versions. Full color, one-color black, and reversed white, so the mark works on a dark truck and an embroidered cap.
4. Color and type are written down. Spot, CMYK, RGB, and HEX for every color in a text file, and the typefaces named with license notes.
5. Rules and an owner. Clear space and minimum size are documented, and one named person owns the brand folder. What a complete package looks like is its own piece.

2. Message and naming

6. One sentence. What you do, for whom, and where, and the same sentence appears on the homepage, the Google listing, and the social bios.
7. One spelling of the name. LLC or not, ampersand or "and," capitalization, all the same everywhere and matching the Sunbiz filing. A Florida fictitious name is $50 for five years and does not grant ownership of or rights to the name, so do not mistake the filing for protection.
8. Offer language. Tagline, service names, and any promise ("same-day," "licensed and insured") match across the site, the truck, the cards, and the invoices.
9. Name, address, and phone identical everywhere. Character for character, on the site, the Google listing, and every directory. In BrightLocal's 2018 Local Citations Trust Report (n=1,025), 80 percent of consumers lose trust over incorrect or inconsistent details and 68 percent would stop using the business. Critical.
10. Signatures and invoices. Every staff email signature and every invoice or estimate template carries the current logo, name, phone, and URL.

3. Website

11. Every page has its own title and description. Seven of my sixteen pages did not on September 22, 2026, because they were client components with no metadata. Critical.
12. A real H1 and a real person. The homepage H1 says what you do in words, and the owner's name is on the site with a bio page a search engine can attach to the business.
13. Core Web Vitals pass. At the 75th percentile of page views: Largest Contentful Paint 2.5 s or under, Interaction to Next Paint 200 ms or under, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.1 or under. Check Search Console or PageSpeed Insights.
14. Crawl basics exist. robots.txt, sitemap.xml, a canonical on every page, and Organization schema. The Next.js checklist has the mechanics.
15. The contact path works on a phone. Tap the number, submit the form, and confirm a human received the email today. Critical.

4. Search presence: can Google find you?

16. Google Business Profile is claimed and verified with the correct primary category, by an account the business controls. The GBP setup piece covers categories. Critical.
17. The profile is complete. Hours, services, the one sentence from item 6, the website link, and photos taken in the last 90 days.
18. Site NAP matches GBP NAP. Whitespark ranks "HTML NAP matching GBP NAP" 15th among individual factors in its 2026 survey. Critical.
19. Directory listings agree. Citations are 6 percent of the local pack in the 2026 survey and still slipping, but Whitespark notes that three of the top five AI search visibility factors are citation factors. Check the ones a customer would open.
20. A site: search returns your pages with your titles. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. Mine returned the about page and a subdomain on September 22, 2026.

5. Reviews: how many, how good, how recent?

The numbers here are from BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published February 11, 2026, from 1,002 consumers.

21. 20 or more reviews. 47 percent of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20. Critical.
22. An average of 4.0 or better, aiming at 4.5. 68 percent require at least 4.0 stars; 31 percent now require 4.5, up from 17 percent in 2025. Critical.
23. Something posted in the last three months. 74 percent only weigh reviews from the last three months. Critical.
24. The owner replies within a week, in their own words. 89 percent expect a reply, 81 percent within a week, and 50 percent dislike templated responses.
25. A repeatable ask. A link or QR code handed over at the point of delivery, by a named person, on every job, not "when we remember."

6. Print and signage

26. Cards carry the current logo, phone, and URL. Check a card from a drawer, not the design file.
27. Print files export correctly. CMYK, 300 dpi at final size, 0.125 in. of bleed, flat K100 for small text, and rich black for large areas, per Vistaprint's prepress checklist.
28. The sign reads at approach distance. The United States Sign Council's rule of thumb is 30 feet of legibility per inch of capital height, and all-caps copy needs about 15 percent more height than upper-and-lower. Measure the approach and do the division.
29. Sign and print colors match the written values. Matched to the spot or CMYK spec, not "close to the blue on the website."
30. Forms, estimates, invoices, and packaging carry the same mark, name, and phone as the card.

7. Vehicles and apparel

31. The wrap carries the current logo, phone, and URL. The truck is the most-seen and least-updated thing you own. Critical.
32. It reads from the next lane. A wrap seen side-on is a parallel sign, and the USSC puts its legibility index at 10 versus about 30 for a sign faced head-on: at 500 feet, 50-inch capitals instead of 17. Keep copy to 40 percent of the panel or less and leave 60 percent negative space. The wrap design rules go deeper.
33. The fleet matches. Same layout, colors, and phone on every vehicle, including the one another shop wrapped three years ago.
34. Required markings are present if it is a commercial motor vehicle. Interstate carriers need the legal or single trade name and USDOT number on both sides, in sharply contrasting letters readily legible from 50 feet in daylight (49 CFR 390.21T). Florida adopts the federal parts that contain that rule for intrastate commercial motor vehicles of 26,001 lb or more and exempts lighter non-hazmat vehicles from that adoption; the statute's own owner-name-and-home-municipality marking, on each side and readable from 50 feet, is written for agricultural haulers of that weight or with three or more axles using the farm exemption (F.S. 316.302). Confirm your class; this is not legal advice.
35. Uniforms, hats, and shirts use the one-color or icon version, drawn for thread rather than the full-color mark.

8. Social and the systems behind it

36. Handles are claimed and consistent on the platforms your customers use, and parked on the rest.
37. The avatar is the icon version, not a wordmark squeezed into a circle.
38. Bios carry the one sentence and a link that opens a page which loads.
39. Templates exist for posts and stories in the brand colors and type, so the next post looks like the last one without a designer.
40. Someone measures. Calls and form submits are key events in GA4, and leads land in a CRM, not in whoever's inbox was open.

Mistakes I see

Auditing the design file instead of the artifact. The file says the phone number is right. The card in the drawer disagrees. When three agents captioned all 185 items in my portfolio in September 2026, they found 59 titles naming the wrong client, medium, or vehicle, including a boat hull wrap filed as a box truck fleet. Data drifts unless someone looks at every image.

Starting with the logo. The failures that cost money are items 9, 15, 21 through 23, and 31: a wrong number, a dead form, a thin review profile, an old truck. None of them needs a designer.

Redesigning to fix inconsistency. A new mark becomes the fifth version in circulation unless the old ones are retired and every vendor gets the new package on the same day.

Accepting "close enough" on color. The sign shop's blue and the printer's blue and the website's blue are three blues until the values are written down and sent.

Treating the score as the deliverable. The score tells you where you are. The ordered fix list is the product.

What it costs / what to expect

Done yourself: an afternoon and nothing. Done by WBX Creative, the audit is part of the consulting practice, which lists a current-state assessment, competitive analysis, gap identification, prioritized recommendations, quick wins, and a long-term roadmap. The published rates as of September 2026 are $125 to $200 an hour or $750 to $1,800 a day, and the pricing page asks you to request a breakdown for your project.

What the fixes cost depends on which items failed. Most criticals cost nothing but attention: correcting a number, replying to reviews, testing a form. For the rest, WBX's published ranges as of September 2026 are:

Fix	Published range
Logo and identity system	$750–$3,000+
Website, design and build	$2,000–$10,000+
Quick Launch site, up to 3, 5, or 8 pages	$1,000, $2,000, or $4,000
Vehicle wrap design, per vehicle	$750–$2,500+

Expect the audit to take longer than the first round of fixes. That is normal and it is the point.

Where to go next

Fix the criticals, then read whichever piece matches your lowest-scoring group: the logo system for group 1 and the Google Business Profile setup for groups 4 and 5; groups 3 and 7 link to their pieces above. If you would rather send me the score and the card from the drawer, the contact page is short, and the bio page explains where the list came from.