Analysing What Your Content Is Really About
Paste your content and this tool ranks the words and two-word phrases it uses most, with common stop words filtered out so the results reflect meaning rather than grammar. Both lists appear side by side and update as you type.
The point is not to hit a target. It is to see your content the way a machine sees it — as a distribution of terms — and check whether that distribution matches what you thought you were writing about.
Why frequency is a useful diagnostic
Writers know what they intended a page to be about. Frequency analysis shows what the page actually emphasises, and the two diverge more often than people expect.
The most common surprise is a page whose top terms are all supporting vocabulary rather than the subject. An article meant to be about email deliverability whose most frequent meaningful terms are “campaign”, “list” and “subscribers” may be a decent article about email marketing generally, but it is not the focused deliverability page you meant to publish.
The opposite finding is equally useful. If one term dominates the list by a wide margin over everything else, the content may be repetitive — saying the same thing several ways rather than developing the topic.
Single words versus two-word phrases
The two lists answer different questions. Single-word frequency shows the vocabulary the content is built from. Phrase frequency shows the concepts, because most real search terms are two or more words.
Phrases are usually the more actionable list. Seeing “running shoes” appear twelve times tells you something the single-word counts for “running” and “shoes” separately do not, since either word alone could belong to a dozen different topics.
For longer phrases, the N-gram Analyzer extends the same idea to three and four-word sequences, which is where repetitive phrasing tends to show up most clearly.
What stop word filtering does
Without filtering, every frequency list looks identical: the, a, and, of, to. These words carry grammar rather than meaning, so they are excluded by default here.
That exclusion is a simplification rather than a truth. Stop words can matter — “how to” is a stop-word phrase that signals intent, and “not” reverses meaning entirely. The Stop Word Counter reports what proportion of your text they make up, which is a rough readability indicator in its own right.
Using this for competitor research
Paste a competitor's page that outranks you and compare its term distribution against yours. This is a crude form of content-gap analysis, but it is free and often revealing: their top terms usually include subtopics your page never mentions.
Read those gaps as questions rather than as words to insert. If their page repeatedly discusses pronation and yours does not mention it, the useful conclusion is that readers of this topic expect pronation to be covered — not that you should sprinkle the word around.
For the AI-assisted version of this, the Extract Keywords from Text tool identifies what a page genuinely targets rather than what it repeats most, which handles synonyms and related concepts that frequency counting misses.
Where frequency misleads
- It counts exact word forms, so “optimise”, “optimising” and “optimisation” are three separate entries rather than one concept.
- It cannot recognise synonyms, so a page carefully varying its vocabulary can look unfocused when it is well written.
- Navigation, footer and boilerplate text pasted in with the content inflates counts for irrelevant terms.
- High frequency is not the same as importance — a term used once in the H1 matters more than one used ten times in a sidebar.
- Short texts produce unstable rankings, where a single extra mention reorders the whole list.
Turning findings into edits
If your target keyword is absent from the top of the list, the fix is usually structural rather than lexical — the page needs a section that genuinely addresses the topic, not more mentions of it. Check placement first with the Keyword Placement Checker, since a keyword missing from the title and H1 is a bigger problem than one missing from the frequency list.
If a term dominates unusually, check the actual density with the Keyword Density Checker and read the passages back. Repetition that looks fine in isolation often reads badly in sequence.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good keyword frequency?
There is no target. Frequency is a diagnostic showing what your content emphasises, not a dial to tune. If your main topic appears among the top terms and nothing dominates unnaturally, the distribution is fine.
Why are common words missing from the results?
Stop words like the, and, of and to are filtered out by default, since they appear in every text and would otherwise fill the entire list. Use the Stop Word Counter if you want to measure them specifically.
Should I copy a competitor's keyword distribution?
No. Use it to spot subtopics they cover and you do not — those gaps are the useful finding. Matching their word counts without covering the same substance produces a page that looks similar and reads worse.
Why are word variations counted separately?
The tool counts exact word forms, so “optimise” and “optimising” are separate entries. This keeps the counting transparent and predictable, but it means you should mentally group related forms when reading the list.
Does this analyse a live page?
No, it analyses text you paste. For a live URL, the On-Page SEO Analyzer fetches the page and reports its real word count, headings and content structure.