Stage 5
Step 5 — Where Northern Illinois Recovery Already Stands
Before deciding what to write, we placed NIR's own blog inside both cohorts. The verdict: NIR already leads its Illinois market decisively and sits well above the national median — so a content push compounds a real strength rather than starting from zero.
246
NIR posts
live blog, actively maintained
~95th
%ile vs IL peers
top decile locally
~71st
%ile vs NAATP
above the national median
~87th
on recency vs IL
41 posts in the last year
Where it sits
Percentile position within each cohort. A dot to the right is better; a band shows a range across metrics.
Against the IL-local cohort
Posts published95th %ile
NIR out-publishes nearly every Illinois provider.
Recency (posts in last year)87th %ile
Among the most actively maintained IL blogs.
Against the national NAATP cohort
Posts published71th %ile
Above the NAATP median on volume for a single-market provider.
Recency63th %ile
Above the national median on freshness — NIR publishes consistently.
What the benchmark tells us
The opportunity is real, not desperate
NIR isn't behind on volume or depth — its average post runs 1,524 words, 81st percentile even against NAATP. The opportunity is coverage: entire owned-service lines (aftercare and alumni, admissions and cost, levels-of-care explainers, several detox subtopics) have program pages but no supporting posts. The gap analysis targets exactly those.A note on the numbers
These percentiles come from the cohort benchmark computed during the analysis run (246 posts, ~1,524 average words, 41 posts in the last year), measured against the Illinois and NAATP cohorts. NIR's blog is live and actively maintained.