Keyword Density Checker

About this tool

Analyzes a block of text and shows how often each word or phrase appears, along with its density — the percentage of total words it makes up. Useful for checking whether an article naturally emphasizes its target keyword, or is at risk of "keyword stuffing" (unnaturally high repetition, which search engines penalize).

Switch between single words, 2-word phrases, and 3-word phrases to see repetition at different levels — a natural-sounding page usually has no single word above 2–3% density.

A brief history. Keyword density was a much bigger deal in SEO's early days (roughly the late 1990s through mid-2000s), when search engines leaned heavily on matching a page's text against a searched term — so stuffing a page with a keyword could genuinely boost rankings. Modern search engines (Google's algorithm updates since Panda in 2011, and especially the shift to semantic/context-based ranking with RankBrain and BERT) evaluate meaning, synonyms, and context far more than raw repetition. Density is now a useful sanity check, not a ranking lever to optimize directly.

A worked example. A 500-word article that mentions "espresso machine" 15 times has a density of 3% for that exact phrase — on the high side, and likely to read as repetitive out loud. The same article using "espresso machine," "the machine," "it," and "your espresso maker" interchangeably across those 15 mentions reads naturally and still signals the same topic to both readers and search engines.

How to use the number. Don't treat 2–3% as a target to hit — treat it as a ceiling to notice you've crossed. If your primary keyword sits comfortably under that on single words, and none of your 2- or 3-word phrases stand out as oddly frequent, the density is a non-issue and you should focus on readability, structure, and whether the content actually answers the query instead.

For raw word/character counts, use the word counter; to see word frequency without the density percentage, the word frequency counter; for how easy the text is to read, the readability checker; and for the page's meta title/description, the meta tag generator.

Frequently asked questions

What's a healthy keyword density?

There's no official target, but most modern SEO guidance suggests keeping any single keyword's density under roughly 2–3% and writing for readability first — search engines evaluate relevance using far more than raw word repetition, and unnaturally high density can look like spam.

Why does turning on phrase length change the results so much?

Single-word density is calculated against total word count; 2- and 3-word phrase density is calculated against the total number of possible phrases of that length (which is roughly the word count minus the phrase length plus one) — so the same repeated phrase will show a different percentage at each setting.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No — all counting and analysis happens locally in your browser.

Does high keyword density actually hurt search rankings?

Modern search engines don't apply a hard penalty at a specific percentage, but text that's obviously stuffed with a keyword reads badly to actual visitors, and algorithms designed to detect low-quality, manipulative content (like Google's Panda update and its successors) can flag it indirectly through signals like poor readability and high bounce rates.

Should I optimize for exact-match keyword density at all?

Not as a primary strategy. Write naturally for your topic, include your target phrase where it genuinely fits (title, intro, a heading or two, and naturally through the body), and use synonyms and related terms elsewhere — this tool is best used as a final check that you haven't accidentally over-repeated a phrase, not as an optimization target.

Why do "ignore common words" and phrase mode interact the way they do?

With common words ignored, a 2- or 3-word phrase is skipped entirely if every word in it is a common word (like "in the a") — so filtering doesn't just hide filler words individually, it also removes phrases made up entirely of them, leaving only phrases with at least one meaningful word.