Keyword Density Checker

Density is a term's share of the total word count, not a raw count. A word used 12 times in a 300-word article sits at 4% density; the same word used 12 times in a 2,000-word article sits at 0.6%. That is why raw counts mislead you: they say nothing about how much of the page a term occupies.

The table lists phrase length, occurrence count and density for every term it found, sorted by count and then by phrase length so exact-match phrases are easy to spot. The unique word ratio, also reported, is a rough measure of vocabulary spread — a very low ratio usually means repetitive writing.

Ranking for a head term is not the same as ranking for the phrase a reader actually types. The phrase length control widens the search from single words up to six-word sequences, and the separate top-phrases list shows only the multi-word results with their counts.

Long phrases are the useful ones for editing, because they tell you the exact wording you used. If a three-word phrase appears once while its component words appear forty times, the page is built around the individual words rather than the phrase you hoped to rank for.

Any single term above 3.5% density is called out. That threshold is a readability flag, not a Google limit — Google publishes no target percentage. Repeated enough times, a term starts replacing ordinary vocabulary, sentences lose their shape, and the page reads as written for a crawler rather than for a person.

Modern search engines use semantic matching and related-term coverage, so a page that repeats one keyword at 8% while omitting every synonym is not optimising, it is repeating. Treat the warning as a prompt to vary the wording, not to hit a number.

Stop words are the connective tissue of the language — the, and, of, is, to. Left in, they dominate the top of any density table and tell you nothing, so they are filtered out by default using a short, deliberately conservative English list. An aggressive list removes real intent, so terms like not, only, before and after stay in.

Minimum word length works the same way for short words: set it to 3 or 4 to ignore the and cat while keeping coffee and espresso. Both controls can be switched off, and an over-broad filter is the usual reason a table comes back empty.

Work top-down. If one term dominates, either replace some of its occurrences with a synonym or a related phrase, or accept it if the page genuinely is about that one thing. If a target phrase sits below 0.25% and appears only twice, decide honestly whether it deserves a section or should leave your target list — a page that tries to rank for forty barely-mentioned terms ranks for none of them.

Re-run the checker after editing and compare the top of the table. The goal is a distribution that looks natural, with the terms you care about present in believable quantities.

Density is not a ranking factor, and no tool can tell you what a search engine decided. It measures your text, not your competition, and it does not read a ranking target, check the page for related terms or tell you where to place keywords.

It is also blind to intent: identical word counts mean completely different things on a product page and a tutorial. Use it as one editing signal alongside the title, headings, internal links and the actual intent of the query you are targeting.