Free keyword density checker for SEO. See single-word, two-word, and three-word phrase density with percentages. Flags potential over-optimization above 5%.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use keyword density when you're writing SEO-targeted content and want to verify your focus keyword is present (but not over-used) in the final draft. Pair with the n-gram analyzer to see what phrases actually dominate the page.
Keyword density is a focused SEO tool. The Word Frequency tool gives raw counts; the N-gram analyzer surfaces phrases without an SEO frame. Use keyword density when "% density" is the metric you need to defend.
Keyword density is the count of a word or phrase divided by the total number of countable words, expressed as a percentage.
For SEO, target 1–3% density for your focus phrase. Above 5% is flagged here as potential keyword stuffing — Google penalizes obviously over-optimized text.
The tool computes 1-word, 2-word, or 3-word phrase density separately. Stopwords and short words are filterable so the top entries surface meaningful content.
1–3% for your focus phrase. Above 5% risks being flagged as keyword stuffing by Google.
Not as a direct ranking signal, but extreme over-optimization triggers spam filters. Modern SEO weights topical coverage and semantic relevance more than density.
Single-word density catches your focus keyword; phrase density catches the long-tail terms (e.g., "remote work productivity") that often drive more qualified traffic.
Input
500-word blog post about "remote work productivity tips".
Output
"remote work" appears 14 times (2.8% density) · "productivity" 9 times (1.8%) · "tips" 7 times (1.4%).
For a focus phrase, 1–3% density is the modern best practice. Anything above 5% risks being flagged as keyword stuffing by Google's ranking signals.
This tool counts single words, bigrams or trigrams, with independent switches for excluding stopwords, setting a minimum word length, including or excluding pure numbers, and case sensitivity. Those switches are not cosmetic — they change the ranking substantially, and a density figure quoted without them is not reproducible.
Stopword exclusion is the big one. Leave it off and the top of any single-word list is "the", "of", "and", which tells you nothing. Turn it on and the ranking becomes topical. For bigrams and trigrams the choice reverses: phrases often need their function words to be meaningful, so excluding stopwords fragments "return on investment" into a phrase nobody searches for.
Fixed keyword-density targets — the "aim for 2%" advice — belong to an era of search ranking that ended a long time ago. Modern retrieval works on semantic relevance and passage-level matching, and text engineered to a density figure reads badly to the humans who ultimately decide whether it was useful.
What the density view is still good for is diagnosis rather than targeting. It shows what a page is actually about, which is frequently not what its author intended: a page meant to be about one topic whose top phrases are all about a related product, or a page whose top terms are boilerplate from a template. Both are worth knowing, and neither is fixed by adjusting a percentage.
% content words vs. function words.
Text analysisVocabulary variety — type‑token ratio.
Text analysisTotal + per‑word syllable counts.
Text analysisHighlight passive sentences in your writing.