Keyword Density Checker

Understand how your keywords are distributed

Keyword density is the share of a page's total word count taken up by a given term, expressed as a percentage: divide the number of occurrences by the total words and multiply by 100. A term used 8 times in a 1,000-word article has a density of 0.8%. The metric dates to the late 1990s, when early search engines ranked pages largely on how often a query term appeared - which is precisely why it should be read as a diagnostic today rather than a target.

The honest version of the SEO advice: Google has publicly stated for years that there is no ideal keyword density and no threshold that triggers a penalty on its own. Modern ranking runs on semantic understanding - BERT and its successors read passages in context - so a page can rank for terms it never states verbatim, and hammering an exact phrase does not help. What Google's spam policies do target is keyword stuffing: repetition that makes text unnatural to read. Density is simply the fastest way to notice you have drifted into that territory.

So the number is most useful as a red flag, not a goal. A practical way to read your results:

• Under 0.5% - your topic may be genuinely under-stated; check that the term appears in the title, H1, opening paragraph, and at least one subheading
• 0.5–2.5% - the range natural writing usually falls into without effort
• Above 3–4% - reread the copy aloud; repetition at this level is normally audible and worth editing out
• A word you did not expect near the top - often a filler verb or a hedge ("really", "various", "process") that has crept in throughout the draft

What to do with the result

Rather than tuning a percentage, use the ranking to check topical coverage. If you are writing about email deliverability, the list should be full of related terms - SPF, DKIM, bounce, inbox, sender - not the same phrase twenty times. Search engines infer relevance from the presence of an entity's natural vocabulary, so a broad, evenly distributed set of related words is a better signal than a single spike.

For editors, the tool doubles as a repetition detector. Seeing "process" at 15 occurrences in 500 words tells you what a careful reader would feel but might not articulate. Vary the vocabulary, or cut the sentences that forced the repeat.

Minimum word length filter: the 3-character default keeps most meaningful words while dropping two-letter prepositions and articles. Move it to 4 or 5 to strip out function words entirely and see only substantive content terms.

Results show the top 20 words in frequency order with a proportional bar - the leader fills the bar and everything else is scaled against it. Note that each word form is counted separately, so "keyword" and "keywords" are two rows; add them yourself when judging coverage of a concept. Analysis is instant, runs entirely in your browser, and your draft is never uploaded - safe for unpublished client work.