Content Co Care
Ongoing content maintenance for government teams who cannot let published content slip.
A Content Co subscription for agencies with more published content than anyone has time to review. Four content audits a year, a progress report every month in between, and a ranked list of what to fix next.
Whether the problem is pages nobody has checked since launch, accessibility failures introduced by edits that were never reviewed, or content describing a service that has quietly moved on, Content Co Care gives you a scheduled way to find it and evidence that it is being fixed.
The problem
Content teams are measured on what they ship. Nobody is measured on what is already live.
Published content drifts as a result, and not through neglect. It is arithmetic. A team of two or three designers can build the new service, or maintain the four hundred pages sitting behind it, and most build the new service because that is what they were asked for.
The content that damages an agency is rarely the content it just published. It is the content it published three years ago and has not looked at since.
- Pages that contradict each other, because two business areas updated at different times
- Content written around a program structure that no longer exists
- Accessibility failures introduced by a well-meaning edit that nobody reviewed
- The answer people actually search for, buried three levels down
- No way to say when a page was last checked, or by whom
Asking a stretched team to try harder does not fix any of this. It is a scheduling problem, and it needs a schedule.
The solution
Content Co Care is a standing maintenance function for content you have already published, run on a repeating cycle so that nothing waits a year for attention.
Each quarter, a full audit of your content estate. Each month in between, a short progress report. Every cycle reports three things:
What you changed
Which findings have closed, which pages have improved, and which have regressed. Evidence you can put in front of an executive without editing it first.
What changed around you
Standards updates, machinery-of-government changes, shifts in what people are searching for, and the slow drift between what a page says and what the service now does.
Where to improve next
A ranked list scoped to what your team can realistically do before the next cycle. Not two hundred findings. The twelve that matter, in order.
About this program
Content care is an unusual specialism. Most content practices sell the build: new services, new sites, migrations, launches. Very few sell what happens to that content in the three years afterwards.
Content Co is led by Ellen Harvey, a content designer and strategist who has spent that time working on the maintenance problem specifically. Writing the governance frameworks. Publishing the review checklists that government teams download and use without ever making contact. Building the training that teaches a team to run the cycle themselves. The work spans federal agencies, the Queensland Government, the Northern Territory Government, the ACT Government, and arts organisations.
Content Co Care exists because the alternative most agencies are offered is another audit, and an audit is a snapshot of a problem that keeps moving. Most of the method behind it is already published, so you can read it and check it before you spend anything.
What makes Content Co Care different
It reports what changed around you, not only what you changed
Most audits measure your content against a standard on the day they run. This measures it against a moving target: new standards, new machinery of government, new search behaviour, and a service that has moved on without the page moving with it.
It is a cycle, not a document
The monthly progress report exists so the work between audits stays visible, and so nobody has to defend a spend against a document that landed nine months ago.
It is honest about what automated testing can and cannot do
Automated accessibility testing finds roughly one third of failures. What you get here is the machine-detectable failures, named as exactly that, and human judgement on everything else.
It shows what the public is being told about you
Every quarterly audit includes an AI visibility snapshot: what people are told when they ask about your services, whether your own content is the source, and where the answer is wrong.
4
full content audits a year, one each quarter
8
monthly progress reports in the months between
12
reports a year in total, so nothing waits a year for attention
10
places in the program, because that keeps the quality high
1
fixed annual price, with no setup fee and no per-report charge
Who is this for
- Content or communications teams of one to four people, responsible for far more content than they can review
- Agencies with a public-facing site where being wrong has consequences
- Teams whose content designers are fully committed to new services and new content
- Organisations expected to meet WCAG 2.2, plain language, and the Australian Government Style Manual, with no scheduled way to check whether they are being met
- Teams with no budget for another full-time hire, and no appetite for recruiting one
Suited to federal, state, territory, and local government teams, and to regulators, statutory authorities, and public sector agencies with a service-delivery obligation
How it works
Free, 30 minutes. We talk about the site, the team, and what is currently going unreviewed.
A short, fixed-scope proposal naming the tier, the price, and what is included.
One fixed annual price, invoiced annually or quarterly — whichever suits your finance area. The audit schedule is set at the same time and then held, so your team knows when each cycle lands and can plan around it.
Access to your search and analytics data, agreement on your priority services, and the question set for the AI visibility snapshot.
The baseline. Everything after this is measured against it.
A full audit each quarter, a short progress report every month in between.
We look back at what actually changed over twelve months. You tell me what was useful and what was not, and we decide together whether to run another year.
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Machine checks run across every page: inventory and structure, orphan pages, duplication, reading grade, sentence and paragraph length, metadata completeness, link health and redirect chains, content age and staleness clustering, and terminology consistency against the Australian Government Style Manual.
Those checks cover ground quickly and consistently. They cannot tell you which twelve of two hundred findings matter, or in what order. They cannot tell you which pages are candidates for retirement rather than rewriting, where the real problem is ownership rather than wording, or what is politically feasible to change this year. That part takes a person, and it is the part the cycle is built around.
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Automated testing detects roughly one third of WCAG 2.2 failures. Content Co Care reports specific machine-detectable failures: contrast, alt text presence, heading order, form labels, link text, and language attributes.
It does not certify conformance, and no report will say that it does. Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 the obligation sits with your agency, and conformance is a judgement about the whole site, including the parts no crawler can reach.
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Included in every quarterly audit, not sold separately.
For a fixed set of the questions the public asks about your services, the audit shows what they are currently being told, whether your own content is the source, and where the answer is wrong, outdated, or drawn from somebody else. The output is not a visibility score. It is the wrong answer, the page it came from, and the fix.
This leads with Google AI Overviews rather than chat assistants, because Overviews are reproducible, they are what most people encounter, and each answer can be traced back to a page you own. Each snapshot is a picture of one moment, so it is never reported as a trend line.
Ten places
Every client holds a fixed slot in the delivery schedule and keeps it year to year. Two clients run in any given week, which caps the program at ten.
That is a capacity limit rather than a marketing device. It is what one person can review properly, and the review is the part you are paying for. When the slots are full, the next start date is the following renewal cycle.
What this is not
- Not an SEO service.
- Not a one-off audit. The value is in the cycle, and a single report is worth considerably less.
- Not a rewrite service. Findings come with recommendations, and implementing them is your team's work or a separate engagement.
- Not an accessibility certification. Be wary of anyone offering one on the basis of automated testing.
- Not real-time monitoring. Quarterly and monthly, deliberately, because government content does not change daily.
Pricing
Essential
$15,000
a year, ex GST
Up to 100 pagesBest for a small site, a single directorate, or a team testing whether the cycle earns its place. Quarterly audit, monthly progress report, AI visibility snapshot, onboarding included.
Standard
$32,000
a year, ex GST
Up to 300 pagesBest for a public-facing site carrying real service content, maintained by a team with no capacity to review it. Everything in Essential, with deeper sampling across the larger estate and page-level detail in the remediation plan, so your team can work through it between cycles without coming back to ask what a finding means.
Onboarding is included and there is no separate setup fee or per-report charge. Estates over 300 pages are quoted separately, because past that size review effort stops scaling predictably and a fixed price would be guesswork.
An APS6 content designer costs over $100,000 in base salary, before superannuation and on-costs. Standard runs at well under a quarter of what that person costs to employ. It does not replace a content designer. It removes the maintenance backlog that stops the content designers you already have from doing the work you hired them for.
Ready to start?
We talk about your site, your team, and what is currently going unreviewed. No pitch, no preparation required. If it is a good fit, I will send a short fixed-scope proposal within a few days.
Prefer email? hello@ellenharvey.com.au.