Keyword Density Checker

How to Use This Tool

1. 1

   Enter your target keyword

   A single word or a phrase, typed the way you expect it to appear in the text.

2. 2

   Paste the content

   Use the body copy only. Menus, footers and sidebars copied from a live page inflate the word count and lower the density.

3. 3

   Read the three numbers

   Total words, exact occurrences and density. Density turns red with a warning above 3%.

4. 4

   Re-read before you edit

   A high or near-zero figure is a reason to read the text aloud, not to insert or delete the phrase mechanically.

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.

Written as a formula: keyword density = (occurrences × words in the keyword) ÷ total words × 100. The total word count uses the same whitespace rule as the Word Counter.

Why Other Tools Show a Different Density

Run the same text through three density checkers and you can get three figures. There is no single standard, and the differences come from a few choices each tool makes.

• Phrase length — some tools divide occurrences by total words without multiplying by the number of words in the phrase, so a two-word keyword reports half the density shown here.
• Stop words — tools that strip words such as “the”, “and” and “of” before counting shrink the total and push every density up.
• What gets counted on a URL — tools that fetch a page often include navigation, footer text, image alt text or the meta description, which changes both sides of the sum.
• Matching — some tools match plurals and word stems together; this one matches the exact words you typed.

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?

Checking a Competitor's Page

Density is also a quick way to see how a page that outranks you handles the same keyword. Copy the main article text from the competing page — not the menu, sidebar or comments — paste it here, and compare the figure with your own draft.

Treat the comparison as context rather than a target. If every page on the first result page sits near 1% and yours is at 4%, that is worth a re-read. If yours is at 1.2% and theirs is at 1.6%, the difference explains nothing, and matching it will not move you up.

Keyword Density and AI Search

AI answer engines such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity retrieve passages by meaning rather than by counting terms, so repetition does no more for them than it does for classic ranking. What does help is a page that states its subject plainly, near the top, in words a person would use to ask about it.

In practice that means the same advice as for search: say what the page is about early, answer the question directly, and cover the related points someone would expect. A density near zero can be a sign the page never names its topic clearly, which is a problem for both kinds of search.

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. The Stop Word Counter shows how much of the text is filler words, which is useful when comparing your figures with a tool that strips them.

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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