Keyword Density Checker

Keyword density — how often a word shows up in your content relative to the total word count — used to be treated as a precise dial SEOs could tune to hit a magic number. This keyword density checker calculates that percentage for every meaningful word in a piece of text, so you can spot a term that's repeated far more (or less) than you intended before you publish, without pretending density alone is a ranking strategy.

Paste in an article, product description, or landing page copy, and the tool counts every single word, filters out common stop words like "the" and "and" by default, and ranks the top 20 remaining words by how often they appear, each shown with a raw count and a percentage of total words. A minimum word-length slider and a stop-word toggle let you adjust what counts as a real keyword versus noise.

Everything runs locally in your browser as you type — there's no submit button holding things up, the counts update live. It's built for a quick sanity check on repetition, not as a replacement for actual topical research or a guarantee about how a search engine will rank the page.

The formula is exactly what it sounds like: density = (number of times a word appears ÷ total word count) × 100. If your article is 1,000 words long and the word "budget" appears 15 times, that's a 1.5% density for "budget" — nothing more mysterious than a count divided by a total.

The total word count used as the denominator includes every word in your text, not just the filtered keywords shown in the results list — so switching the stop-word filter on or off changes which words appear in the top-20 list, but it does not change the total-word denominator each percentage is calculated against.

This tool's own color coding treats roughly 1–3% as a reasonable range, 3–5% as getting high, and above 5% as likely excessive — a rough guideline shared by a lot of SEO tools going back over a decade. It's a useful sanity check, but there's no research-backed exact percentage that search engines actually reward, and no external verification that any specific number correlates with better rankings today.

Modern search ranking relies far more heavily on topical relevance and natural language understanding — systems designed to recognize synonyms, related concepts, and whether content actually and thoroughly answers a query — than on literal repeat counts of one exact phrase. Treat the density percentage as a repetition check, not a target to hit; content that reads naturally and covers a topic thoroughly, using varied related terms rather than the same exact word over and over, tends to serve readers (and search engines) better than content engineered to land in a specific density band.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating a term or phrase far more than natural language would, often crammed into places a reader wouldn't normally read closely — image alt text, footer text, or a list of keyword variations with no sentence structure around them. Search engines' spam-fighting systems are built to recognize exactly this pattern: unnatural repetition disconnected from the actual flow of the content.

A practical test: read the sentence containing a high-density word out loud. If it sounds like something you'd actually say to a person, it's very likely fine, no matter what the percentage reads. If it sounds like a word was awkwardly forced in for the sake of hitting a target, that's the version worth rewriting, and this tool is best used to flag where to look, not to justify keeping something that already reads oddly.

It's worth being precise about a real limitation here: this checker counts individual words only. A two-word phrase like "keyword density" is not tracked as one unit — it shows up in the results as two separate rows, "keyword" and "density," each with its own independent percentage. If your actual target phrase is a multi-word term, this tool won't tell you its combined frequency directly.

The word-matching itself is also strictly alphabetic — it only recognizes runs of letters, so contractions like "don't" get split at the apostrophe into "don" and "t," and hyphenated compounds like "state-of-the-art" get broken into separate words at each hyphen. For an exact count of a specific multi-word phrase, your browser's own Ctrl+F / Cmd+F find-and-count feature on the raw text will give you a more precise answer than this tool's word-by-word breakdown.

The stop-word filter removes a fixed list of common English function words — articles, prepositions, pronouns, and similar filler like "the," "and," "is," and "with" — so the results list surfaces meaningful topic words instead of being dominated by words that appear constantly in any English sentence. This is the setting you'll want on for almost any normal SEO content review.

The minimum word-length slider (2 to 8 characters) filters out short words below that threshold, which is a rougher second pass at reducing noise — raising it to 4 or 5 tends to push past short connector words that survive the stop-word list. Turn the stop-word filter off only when you specifically need raw, unfiltered word frequency — for instance, checking exact repetition in dialogue, lyrics, or legal text where common words matter to the count.

Each keyword row shows a horizontal bar alongside its raw count and percentage, colored green for roughly 1–3%, yellow for 3–5%, and red above 5% — a quick visual scan lets you spot the handful of words worth a closer look without reading every number individually. The three summary tiles above the list — total words, unique words, and number of keywords shown — give you a fast sense of the content's overall length and vocabulary variety before you even look at individual terms.

A single red bar isn't automatically a problem on its own — a branded product name or a core, unavoidable technical term can legitimately repeat often in short copy. Use the color as a prompt to go read that word in context, not as an automatic verdict that something needs to be cut.