How to check keyword density
Three steps, no signup, and nothing you paste is stored.
1. Paste your text or enter a URL
Paste a draft straight from your editor, or switch to URL mode and let the tool fetch the page. In URL mode we strip navigation, footers and comment threads first, so menu labels don't drown out your copy.
2. Add your target keywords (optional)
Type the keywords you actually want to rank for, separated by commas. Each gets its own row showing how often it appears, its density, and whether it is missing or pushed into stuffing territory.
3. Read the tables, phrases first
The tool opens on the 2-word table on purpose. Single words are noisy; phrases carry topic and intent. Work down from the highest density and ask whether each phrase earns its repetition.
What this keyword density checker shows you
Every run returns the same things:
- Total words — the denominator behind every percentage on the page.
- Unique keywords — how varied your vocabulary actually is.
- Top focus — the single phrase your content leans on hardest.
- Stuffing risk — how many separate topics are over-used.
- Frequency tables for 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-word phrases, colour-coded by band.
- Presence indicators (URL mode) — whether each keyword also appears in your title, meta description and headings.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears in a piece of content, expressed as a percentage of the total word count. For a single word the formula is simple: divide the number of occurrences by the total number of words, then multiply by 100.
So a word used 12 times in a 600-word article has a density of 2%. For phrases we count the words the phrase actually takes up, because a three-word phrase used 12 times fills 36 words, not 12 — that is 6% of the same article, and it is the honest number for judging whether you are over-doing it.
You will see "keyword density" and "keyword frequency" used interchangeably, but they are not the same measurement. Frequency is the raw count; density is how much of the page that count actually occupies.
What is the ideal keyword density for SEO?
There is no magic number, and any tool that gives you one is selling certainty it does not have.
Why there is no perfect number
Most SEOs work with a rough 1–3% comfort zone, and that is a sanity check rather than a target. Google has never published a density threshold, because density is a symptom, not a ranking factor. Write naturally and you will usually land in that range without trying.
When a high density is a red flag
Above roughly 5–7%, repetition stops reading as emphasis and starts reading as manipulation. The useful question is never "am I at 2.4%?" but "would a reader notice how often I am saying this?" If a phrase is high because the topic demands it, fine. If it is high because you were hitting a quota, rewrite it.
Keyword density vs keyword frequency
Keyword frequency is the raw number of times a term appears. Keyword density is that number divided by the total word count, shown as a percentage.
Frequency tells you what you repeated. Density tells you whether that repetition is proportionate to the length of the page. This tool shows both side by side, because one without the other is misleading.
What is keyword stuffing, and how to avoid it
Keyword stuffing is loading a page with repeated terms to influence rankings, at the cost of how it reads. It is one of the oldest SEO tactics and one of the most reliably penalised.
How Google treats over-optimization
Google's spam policies name keyword stuffing explicitly. The internal Content Warehouse documentation that surfaced publicly in 2024 even included a keywordStuffingScore attribute — a 0-to-127 measure of how stuffed a page looks — a reminder that over-optimization is measured directly, not just a stylistic concern.
How to fix a stuffed page
Swap repeated phrases for synonyms and natural variations. Bring in related entities — the people, products and concepts a knowledgeable writer would mention anyway — so the page covers the topic instead of hammering the term. Then restructure: a stuffed passage is often two thin paragraphs that should be one good one.
Why phrases matter more than single words
A single-word table tells you that "shoes" appears 30 times. That is almost useless on its own — it could be a running shop, a repair guide or a history of footwear.
The 2- and 3-word tables tell you it was "trail running shoes" all along. That is the topic, and it is closer to what people actually search for. Intent lives in phrases, not in individual nouns.
A note on stop words
The tool filters common stop words — "the", "a", "of", "and" and their equivalents — from the edges of every phrase. Without that filter the tables fill up with "the best" and "is a", and the report tells you nothing.
It does this per language. A French page gets French stop words, a German page gets German ones, so your tables are not clogged with "de", "la" or "und". Stop words still count toward your total word count — they are just excluded from anchoring a keyword.
Does keyword density still matter in 2026?
Less than most tools imply. Modern Google reads synonyms, entities and topic coverage; it does not tally your repetitions and reward a ratio. Density has been a minor, indirect signal for years.
What changed is the second audience. LLMs now sit between your content and a large share of your readers, and they treat stuffed writing the way a human editor would — low quality, hard to summarise, unconvincing to cite.
From density to topic coverage
The better question is not "how often did I say this?" but "did I cover what someone asking about this needs to know?" Density is a guardrail against over-optimization, not a dial to tune upward.
What this means for AI search visibility
If you want to know how your pages are actually read by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini — and whether you get mentioned at all — density will not tell you. Our free GEO Audit will.
