Keyword Density Checker

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the percentage of a piece of text that a particular word or phrase makes up. If a 500-word article uses the word "coffee" ten times, the keyword density of "coffee" is 10 divided by 500, times 100 — two percent. A keyword density checker just automates that count so you don't have to tally words by hand.

This keyword density tool works the same way for single words, two-word phrases, and three-word phrases, so a keyword frequency counter here isn't limited to lone words — it also catches phrases like "content marketing strategy" that you might repeat without noticing. Paste any text and it recalculates as you type, showing you the words and phrases that make up the largest share of what you wrote.

How to use it

1. Paste your text into the box at the top. Results recalculate as you type, so there's nothing to submit and nothing to wait on.
2. Choose a phrase length single words, two-word phrases, or three-word phrases — and leave "Ignore common words" checked to filter out function words, or switch it off to see the raw counts.
3. Read the results table the top 20 words or phrases, each with its occurrence count and density percentage, alongside the total word count for the whole text. Use Copy to grab your text or Clear to start over.

There is no ideal keyword density

Here's the honest answer up front: keyword density is not a Google ranking factor. Google's John Mueller has said this plainly and repeatedly for well over a decade — there is no optimal keyword density, no magic number the algorithm is checking for. The one-to-two percent figure that circulates in SEO advice isn't a target to aim for; it's a rough guardrail against obvious keyword stuffing, and even that is more folklore than formula.

So what is a keyword density checker actually good for? Use it as a mirror, not a scoreboard. Paste a draft and you'll quickly see repetition you didn't notice while writing, confirm that the topic you meant to cover actually shows up in the text, and spot phrases you lean on so often they start to sound like a tic. That's a genuinely useful edit to make — it just has nothing to do with rankings.

Writing toward a percentage tends to produce worse text, not better rankings. A page that reads like it was assembled to hit a number reads that way to actual visitors too — repetitive, stiff, over-stuffed with a phrase that stops sounding natural by the third paragraph. Use this tool to catch that pattern in your own writing, then fix it because it makes the writing better, not because a checker told you to.

How this tool counts

Phrases never cross a sentence boundary. Given "It was the end. The next morning was cold.", this tool will never surface "end the next" as a phrase — nobody wrote that, it's just an artifact of sliding a window across the whole text, which is what many simple tools do. Sentence detection also carries over the same title-abbreviation handling used elsewhere on this site, so "Ask Dr. Smith about it." is read as one sentence and its phrases stay intact. Common function words are filtered out by default — otherwise every top result would be "of the" and "in the" — but the filter only drops a phrase when it begins or ends with a function word, which discards "of the" while keeping a phrase like "state of the art" whole.

Density is calculated as occurrences divided by the total number of words in the text, times 100 — and that total includes the common words even when they're filtered out of the results table, because that's the honest denominator. Tools genuinely disagree here: some divide by the number of phrase slots instead of total words, which makes the same text look artificially denser as the phrase length grows, so this page states its formula rather than leaving you to guess. A few honest limits worth knowing: the common-word list is deliberately conservative and won't catch every function word; matching is exact, so "run", "runs", and "running" count as three separate entries with no stemming or lemmatisation; and in Arabic, where the definite article attaches directly to the word, a word with and without it counts as two different words. The tool also only ever looks at the text you paste — not headings, links, title tags, or anything about the page it came from.

Why is it free?

Everything runs in your browser. The text you paste is never uploaded anywhere, there's no account to create, and no paid tier hiding a better version of the count. Open the page, paste your text, and read the results — that's the entire transaction.