Check keyword density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific word or phrase appears relative to the total word count on a page. It is one of the oldest on-page signals in search engine optimization, and although modern ranking systems are far more sophisticated than a simple frequency count, the underlying idea still matters: if your target term barely appears, search engines have weak evidence that the page is actually about that topic. A keyword density checker turns a vague gut feeling about whether you have written 'enough' about your subject into a concrete, measurable number you can act on. Without that number you are essentially optimizing blind, scrolling back through your draft and guessing whether the focus term shows up too little or too much. The checker replaces guesswork with a clear, repeatable measurement you can compare across drafts, pages, and even competing articles, so every editorial decision about word choice is grounded in data rather than instinct.

The opposite problem is just as damaging. When writers consciously try to rank, they often repeat the same phrase far too many times in a short span, producing copy that reads awkwardly and trips spam filters. This practice, known as keyword stuffing, was effective two decades ago but is now actively penalized — Google's guidelines explicitly warn against loading pages with repetitive words in an attempt to manipulate rankings. A density checker exposes stuffing instantly by showing you that a term occupies, say, 6% of the page instead of a natural 1–2%, giving you a chance to fix it before you publish. Stuffing is rarely deliberate sabotage; more often it creeps in when a writer is anxious about a target keyword and keeps forcing it into sentences where a pronoun or synonym would read more smoothly. Because the eye glosses over familiar words, you genuinely may not notice the repetition until a tool counts it for you. Catching that pattern early protects both your rankings and the reader's experience, since over-stuffed copy feels mechanical and erodes trust long before any algorithm intervenes.

Density also helps you understand intent and topical coverage. By surfacing your most frequent meaningful words, the tool effectively summarizes what the page is really emphasizing. Sometimes that summary is a surprise: you set out to write about 'email marketing automation' but the checker reveals that 'software,' 'features,' and 'pricing' dominate instead. That mismatch between your intended focus and your actual word distribution is exactly the kind of signal that hurts relevance, and seeing it spelled out as percentages makes the gap obvious and easy to close. Search intent is ultimately about matching the words a reader uses with the words on your page, and a frequency snapshot is the quickest way to audit that match. If the dominant terms align with what your audience is searching for, you are on track; if they drift toward tangents, internal jargon, or sales boilerplate, the density report flags the drift so you can steer the copy back toward the questions your visitors actually came to answer.

Frequency analysis is useful far beyond a single focus keyword. The same data tells you which supporting terms, synonyms, and related concepts you have naturally woven into the copy. Search engines reward content that covers a topic comprehensively rather than mechanically repeating one phrase, so reviewing the full ranked list of terms helps you confirm you are using a rich, varied vocabulary. If important related words are missing or rare, that is a prompt to expand the section rather than simply repeat the head term again. Comprehensive coverage is increasingly how rankings are decided: a page that discusses the surrounding subtopics, common questions, and natural variations of a phrase signals genuine expertise, while a thin page that hammers one keyword signals the opposite. Used this way, the density report doubles as a content-gap finder, nudging you to bring in the synonyms and adjacent ideas a knowledgeable writer would mention anyway, and helping you build the kind of well-rounded article that both readers and algorithms tend to favor.

This particular checker counts every meaningful word in your text, ignoring common stop words such as 'the,' 'and,' and 'of' so the results highlight substance rather than grammatical glue. For each term it reports both the raw count and the density percentage, calculated against the total word count, and ranks them from most to least frequent. Because the calculation is transparent — count divided by total words — you can trust the numbers and even cross-check them by hand if you wish, which is rarely possible with opaque all-in-one SEO suites. Filtering out stop words matters more than it might seem, because in ordinary prose those function words are by far the most frequent and would otherwise crowd the top of any raw count, burying the terms you actually care about. By removing them, the report goes straight to the nouns, verbs, and topic words that define your page, giving you a clean, immediately useful picture instead of a list dominated by articles and prepositions you can do nothing with.

It also pays to think about how density connects to term frequency, the classic information-retrieval concept that early search engines leaned on heavily. Term frequency simply measures how often a word occurs in a document, and density is that frequency expressed as a share of the whole. Search systems have long combined term frequency with inverse document frequency — how rare a word is across the wider web — to judge relevance, which is why a moderately frequent but distinctive term carries far more weight than a common word repeated endlessly. Reading the ranked list with that lens helps you focus on the specific, meaningful phrases that actually distinguish your page rather than padding it with generic vocabulary that every competing page already contains in abundance. In practice this means you should care less about driving up the count of a broad, high-competition word and more about the precise, intent-rich terms that set your page apart. A density report makes that prioritization tangible: scan for the distinctive words near the top, make sure they are present at a believable rate, and resist the urge to inflate generic terms that add volume but little relevance.

A density checker is equally valuable for planning supporting phrases and n-grams, the two and three word combinations that capture how people really search. Single-word counts tell you which roots dominate, and from there you can reason about the phrases those roots belong to: if 'running' and 'shoes' both rank highly, the page is plainly leaning toward 'running shoes,' and you can decide whether that phrase appears with the right frequency in headings, the opening paragraph, and the body. Mapping your single-word densities back onto the longer phrases your audience types lets you align the copy with genuine search intent instead of optimizing for isolated words that, on their own, signal nothing about what the reader actually wants. This phrase-level thinking is especially important for long-tail keywords, the longer and more specific queries that often convert best precisely because they reflect a clear, narrow intent. By checking that the component words of your chosen long-tail phrases appear consistently — and in the right places — you give search engines and readers a coherent, unambiguous picture of exactly what the page delivers, which is far more effective than scattering disconnected single words throughout the text.

Finally, the entire analysis happens in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded to a server, logged, or stored, which means you can safely check unpublished drafts, client work under NDA, or internal documentation without worrying about leaking confidential text. There is no sign-up, no quota, and no waiting on a network round-trip, so you can run the same passage through the checker dozens of times as you edit, watching the densities settle into a natural, readable range with every revision. That tight feedback loop — write, check, adjust, check again — is what turns keyword density from an abstract rule into a practical, repeatable habit that quietly improves every page you produce.