Keyword Density Checker
Analyse your text to see which keywords appear most often and at what density. Spot over-used words, find bigrams, and search or replace any term directly.
How to use the keyword density checker
Paste your content above. The keyword table populates instantly, sorted by frequency by default. Click any row to highlight every occurrence of that word in your text. Use the Find & Replace panel to swap a keyword throughout the document in one click. Toggle bigrams to see two-word phrase frequencies alongside single keywords.
How keyword density is calculated
Density % = (keyword count ÷ total words) × 100. Stop words are excluded from the total when the “hide stop words” toggle is active, which gives a cleaner picture of your meaningful vocabulary distribution. Bigram density uses the same formula with total two-word windows as the denominator.
Why keyword density matters for SEO
While keyword density alone isn't a direct ranking factor, it signals topical relevance. A page about “running shoes” that never uses those words is unlikely to rank for that query. Conversely, over-repeating a keyword (stuffing) can trigger manual or algorithmic penalties. The goal is natural usage — the tool helps you spot extremes in either direction.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good keyword density percentage?
There is no magic number. Google has never confirmed an ideal keyword density, and former employees have explicitly stated it is not a ranking signal in the way the SEO industry treats it. A density of 1–3% for your primary keyword is common in well-ranking content, but that's correlation, not causation — those pages rank because they're comprehensive and relevant, not because they hit a percentage. Use this tool to check you're not over-stuffing (5%+ of a single keyword reads unnaturally) and that your key terms appear enough times to signal topic relevance.
What are stop words?
Stop words are common function words that carry almost no meaning on their own: 'the', 'a', 'is', 'and', 'of', 'in', and so on. They are filtered out by default because they would dominate the frequency table otherwise — 'the' typically accounts for 6–7% of all words in English prose. Toggle 'Show stop words' on if you want to analyse sentence structure or writing style rather than topic relevance.
What is keyword density and how is it calculated?
Keyword density is the percentage of words in a text that are a specific keyword. Formula: (keyword occurrences ÷ total word count) × 100. For example, if 'marketing' appears 8 times in a 400-word article, the density is 2%. This tool calculates density after stripping stop words when that toggle is active — the denominator changes, so densities are higher in stop-word-filtered view.
What are bigrams and why are they useful?
Bigrams are two consecutive words treated as a phrase — 'social media', 'search engine', 'machine learning'. They're useful because keyword research is increasingly phrase-based, not single-word-based. Checking bigram frequency tells you whether your natural writing actually includes the phrases you're targeting, not just the individual words. It also surfaces accidental phrase repetition that single-word counts miss.
Does keyword density affect SEO rankings?
Not directly. Google's ranking systems have evolved well beyond simple keyword counting — they understand semantic relationships between words, so you don't need to force exact keyword repetition. What keyword density analysis is still useful for: (1) confirming your content is genuinely about the topic you intend, (2) catching over-optimisation that reads unnaturally, (3) identifying gaps where you've mentioned a sub-topic once but should develop it further.
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