How we turned a national treatment-content corpus into 15 publishable posts for Northern Illinois Recovery.
This is the entire content pipeline, opened up for review — one page per step, from the raw data cohort all the way to finished drafts. Walk it in order and inspect any artifact along the way.
What this is
Northern Illinois Recovery is a full-continuum addiction and mental-health treatment provider in Crystal Lake, Illinois (McHenry County), serving Chicagoland and northern Illinois. It runs medically supervised detox with per-substance tracks, residential treatment, PHP, IOP, outpatient, telehealth, MAT and medication management, dual-diagnosis care, and teen programs — every level of care under one roof.
To grow NIR's organic reach, we benchmarked its blog against two cohorts — its Illinois peers and the national NAATP membership — found the topics it was missing within its own service line, and generated a first batch of fifteen posts through a three-round, SEO-grounded writing pipeline. Every stage is reproducible and every intermediate artifact is preserved here for scrutiny.
The eleven stages
Each stage is a single page. They build on each other, so reading top to bottom tells the whole story — but you can jump straight to anything.
- 01Data SourcesFive provider directories plus a WordPress content corpus — the raw material everything downstream is built from.
- 02SegmentationFrom a national corpus down to the 188 IL-local and 128 NAATP domains that define NIR's competitive set.
- 03Blog InventoriesEvery blog in both cohorts, sized and dated — and where NIR's already-substantial blog sits against each.
- 04Topic TaxonomyA topic taxonomy over every blog title in both cohorts, with demand and coverage per theme.
- 05BenchmarkNIR benchmarked against both cohorts: top-decile in Illinois on volume and depth, above the NAATP median.
- 06Gap AnalysisThe themes NIR is missing — with nothing excluded, because a full-continuum provider owns every level of care.
- 07Content BriefsThe 54-topic Tier-A backlog narrowed to the 15 briefs that became the pipeline's input.
- 08SEO IntelPer keyword: the Chicago, IL SERP, scraped competitor pages, and the on-page intel that steers the rewrite.
- 09GenerationDraft → SEO rewrite → editorial polish, run live against the Messages API. Architecture, prompts, and guardrails.
- 10The PostsEach finished post, with its Round 1 → Round 2 → Final progression and round-to-round diffs.
- 11Run RecordsThe actual run: 15 posts × 3 rounds, on the record — every round, the model, and the wall-clock.