Keyword Density Checker

How the calculation works

The tool counts whole-word, case-insensitive matches of your keyword using word boundaries, so searching for “run” will not match “running” or “brunch”. Multi-word phrases are matched as phrases: “running shoes” counts only where those two words appear together in that order.

For multi-word keywords, the density calculation accounts for phrase length. If “running shoes” appears five times in a 100-word text, that is ten keyword words out of 100, so 10% — not 5%. This matches how density is conventionally measured and avoids under-reporting long phrases.

What density number should you aim for?

There is no official target, and any tool that tells you to hit exactly 2.5% is inventing precision that does not exist. Google does not publish a density threshold and has consistently discouraged writing to one.

As a rough guide, most naturally written content that is genuinely about a topic lands somewhere between 0.5% and 2.5% for its main keyword without the writer trying. If you write the page properly and then measure, you will usually find you are already in that range.

Above roughly 3%, the number becomes worth investigating. That does not automatically mean you are penalised — a short product page legitimately mentioning the product name repeatedly can run high — but it does mean you should read the text back and ask whether it still sounds like it was written for a person.

Below about 0.3% on a page targeting a competitive query is worth a look for the opposite reason. It sometimes means the page dances around its subject using pronouns and synonyms without ever stating plainly what it is about.

Why keyword stuffing backfires

Keyword stuffing — repeating a term unnaturally to game rankings — is explicitly listed in Google's spam policies. Modern search engines understand synonyms, related entities, and context, so repetition adds nothing they cannot already infer from a well-written page.

The practical damage is usually to readers before it is to rankings. Stuffed copy reads badly, people leave, and the page fails for ordinary reasons. If your density is high and the writing feels forced when read aloud, fix the writing — the density number will follow.

Better things to check than density

Where a keyword appears matters far more than how many times it appears. A keyword used once in the title, once in the H1, and once naturally in the opening paragraph does more for relevance than the same keyword repeated fifteen times in body copy.

• Is the keyword in the title tag, ideally near the beginning?
• Is it in the H1, phrased naturally rather than bolted on?
• Does it appear in the first paragraph, where both readers and crawlers weight it heavily?
• Do related terms and subtopics appear — the things someone searching this would expect to see covered?
• Does the page actually answer the query, or does it just contain the words from it?

Using this tool in a real workflow

The most productive way to use a density checker is after writing, not during. Write the page for the reader, then paste it here and check that the main keyword shows up at a sane rate. If it does, you are done. If it is very high or near zero, that is a prompt to re-read, not to start inserting or deleting the phrase mechanically.

It is also useful for auditing content you inherited. Pages written years ago under older SEO advice are often stuffed, and density gives you a fast way to spot the worst offenders in a batch before rewriting them.

Tools that answer the questions density cannot

Density tells you how often one keyword appears. To see which terms your content actually leans on — including ones you did not plan to target — run it through the Keyword Frequency Analyzer, or use the N-gram Analyzer to surface repeated two, three and four-word phrases.

Because placement beats repetition, the Keyword Placement Checker is often more useful than density: it confirms whether your keyword appears in the title, meta description, H1, URL and opening paragraph. The Keyword Prominence Checker goes further and measures how early in the page it first shows up.

For a live page rather than pasted text, the On-Page SEO Analyzer fetches the URL and reports all of this from the real HTML.

Frequently asked questions

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