Free keyword density checker
Keyword density is the percentage of a page's words that one term accounts for. Paste your text or enter a URL to see your word count, the terms you use most and the two- and three-word phrases you repeat.
How the percentages are calculated
Density is occurrences divided by the number of available positions, times 100. For single words that is simply the total word count. For phrases it is the number of windows of that length — a 1,000-word page contains 999 two-word windows, not 1,000 — which is the honest denominator and the reason our phrase percentages sometimes differ slightly from tools that divide everything by the word count.
When you submit a URL we fetch the page and measure the visible text, including navigation and footer wording. That is deliberate: a crawler reads those too, and excluding them would report a density your page does not actually have. Scripts and styles are stripped, since neither is text anybody reads.
What to do with the result
The single most useful check is whether your intended topic appears in the phrase tables at all. A page you wrote about one subject that lists something else as its most repeated phrase is a page whose focus drifted, and that is worth fixing regardless of any percentage.
The second is the total word count. Very short pages struggle not because of density but because there is not enough on them to establish what they cover — and depth is what actually wins competitive terms. Pages at the top of hard results tend to cover a subject broadly, touching page speed, security, metadata, content structure, accessibility and increasingly AI visibility, rather than repeating one phrase more often than the page below them.
What density will not tell you is whether the page can be found at all. For that you need to know whether it is indexable, how fast it loads, and whether its metadata is intact — which is what the full website audit covers, and what our guide on checking whether a site is SEO optimized walks through step by step.
The keyword density myth, briefly
The 1-2% rule appears in a great deal of SEO advice and comes from nowhere. It is not in Google’s documentation, it has never been confirmed by anyone at Google, and it is contradicted by the top of almost any competitive result page you care to measure. Google’s own guidance on the subject is about keyword stuffing — repetition to the point of harming the reader — and says nothing about an optimal rate.
Which makes this tool a diagnostic rather than a target. It tells you what you wrote. Whether that is the right thing to have written is a judgment about your reader, and no percentage substitutes for reading the page.
Keyword density questions
- What is keyword density?
- Keyword density is the percentage of a page's total words that a specific word or phrase accounts for. A term used 10 times in a 1,000-word page has a density of 1%. It is a descriptive measurement of what you wrote, not a target to hit.
- What is a good keyword density?
- There is no good keyword density, because Google does not use a density threshold. The widely repeated 1-2% figure has no basis in any published guidance. Pages routinely rank at the top of competitive results with their target phrase appearing well under 0.5% of the time.
- Can keyword density be too high?
- Yes, in the sense that repeating a phrase past the point of natural writing reads badly and can be treated as keyword stuffing, which is a spam policy violation. The reliable test is not a number: read the sentence aloud, and if the repetition sounds forced, it is.
- Why does this tool show phrases and not just single words?
- Because people search in phrases, not words. A page can have a low density for every individual word while repeating one three-word phrase constantly, and the phrase tables are where that shows up. Two- and three-word results are usually more informative than the single-word list.
- Why are common words like “the” and “and” missing?
- Function words are filtered out of the single-word results because they top the list on every page ever written and tell you nothing about your own content. They are still counted in the total word count and still form part of the phrase results where they sit inside a longer term.
- Should I use this to optimize a page?
- Use it to check what a page is actually about, not to hit a percentage. The useful reading is whether your intended topic appears in the top phrases at all — if a page written about email deliverability lists “website design” as its most repeated phrase, that is a real finding worth acting on.
- What is a good keyword density percentage for SEO?
- There is no official target percentage, and Google has never published one, but natural writing usually lands a primary term somewhere around one to two percent without any effort to hit a number. Chasing a specific figure is the wrong goal — write for the reader and let density fall where it does.
- Does keyword density still matter for SEO?
- Keyword density is not a modern ranking factor, and search engines stopped rewarding raw term counts long ago in favour of meaning and context. It remains useful only as a diagnostic — a page with almost no mention of its topic may be under-focused, and one stuffed far above natural levels may read as spam.
- What is keyword stuffing and how do I avoid it?
- Keyword stuffing is repeating a term unnaturally often to try to manipulate rankings, and it can trigger a spam action rather than help. Avoid it by writing the page for a person first, using synonyms and related phrases instead of the same words, and only checking density afterwards to confirm nothing looks forced.
- How do I calculate keyword density by hand?
- Keyword density is the number of times a term appears divided by the total word count, multiplied by one hundred to get a percentage. For a phrase, count the phrase as one occurrence rather than counting each word — this tool does that automatically and also groups multi-word phrases so the figures reflect real usage.
- What is the difference between keyword density and keyword frequency?
- Keyword frequency is the raw number of times a term appears, while density expresses that count as a share of the whole page. Frequency alone is misleading because ten mentions means something very different on a 200-word page than on a 2,000-word one, which is why density is the more useful measure.
- Which keywords should I optimize a page for?
- A page should target one primary term that matches its main intent, plus a small set of closely related phrases people use for the same need. Trying to rank one page for many unrelated terms usually means it ranks well for none, so split distinct topics onto separate pages instead.