Free keyword density checker
Paste a draft or the body copy of a live page to see which words and phrases you repeat most, how often a focus keyword appears and where in the text it sits. Use it to catch accidental keyword stuffing and to confirm that the terms searchers use are actually on the page. Nothing you paste leaves your browser.
179 words. "sourdough" appears 3 times, 1.68 percent.
sourdough179 words in totalAppears 3 times, which is 1.68% of all words, about once every 60 words. First use: word 1.
| # | Word | Count | % of words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | bread | 6 | 3.35 |
| 2 | loaf | 5 | 2.79 |
| 3 | bag | 3 | 1.68 |
| 4 | sourdough | 3 | 1.68 |
| 5 | crumb | 2 | 1.12 |
| 6 | crust | 2 | 1.12 |
| 7 | cut | 2 | 1.12 |
| 8 | day | 2 | 1.12 |
| 9 | first | 2 | 1.12 |
| 10 | frozen | 2 | 1.12 |
| 11 | hours | 2 | 1.12 |
| 12 | moisture | 2 | 1.12 |
| 13 | room | 2 | 1.12 |
| 14 | stays | 2 | 1.12 |
| 15 | temperature | 2 | 1.12 |
| 16 | three | 2 | 1.12 |
| 17 | acids | 1 | 0.56 |
| 18 | air | 1 | 0.56 |
| 19 | avoid | 1 | 0.56 |
| 20 | bags | 1 | 0.56 |
| 21 | blitz | 1 | 0.56 |
| 22 | board | 1 | 0.56 |
| 23 | breadcrumbs | 1 | 0.56 |
| 24 | cold | 1 | 0.56 |
| 25 | counter | 1 | 0.56 |
- Keyword density is not a Google ranking factor and there is no ideal percentage. Use the counts to catch stuffing and to confirm the words people search for actually appear.
What keyword density can and cannot tell you
Google has said for more than a decade that it does not use keyword density as a ranking signal, and there is no percentage that makes a page rank. What its spam policies do name is keyword stuffing: filling a page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings, often in lists or out of context. Serious cases can end in a manual action.
That leaves two jobs where counting words is genuinely useful:
- Spotting stuffing. A phrase that turns up in every paragraph, a run of city names, or a product name repeated where a pronoun would read better. If the top phrases table reads like a list of target keywords rather than a summary of the topic, read the page aloud.
- Checking coverage. A page about storing bread that never says "freeze" probably does not answer the freezing question. The 2 and 3-word phrase tabs show which ideas the page actually spends words on.
How the numbers are calculated
- Words are split on spaces and punctuation. Hyphenated words and contractions count once, and so do numbers like 1,500.
- Phrases never cross a sentence end, a colon, a semicolon or a line break, so "bread. Freeze" is not counted as "bread freeze". 2 and 3-word phrases are listed only when they occur at least twice.
- Percent is occurrences divided by the total word count, for every phrase length, so the figures are comparable across tabs.
- Ignore stop words drops single words like "the" and "of", and skips phrases that start or end with one. Phrases with a stop word in the middle, such as "cost of living", are kept.
- The focus keyword matches whole words, ignoring case: "seo" does not match "Seoul". Plurals and other variants are separate phrases, so check them separately.
A better workflow than chasing a percentage
- In Search Console, open Performance, filter to the page and look at the Queries tab.
- Paste the page text here and compare the phrase tabs with those queries.
- Where a query has impressions but its words are missing from the page, the page probably does not answer it yet. Add a section that does, written for the reader.
- Where one phrase is repeated far more than a person would naturally say it, cut it back.
If two of your pages lean on the same phrases for the same intent, they may be competing with each other; see how to fix keyword cannibalization.
Common questions
What is a good keyword density?
There is no good or bad number. Google does not use density as a ranking factor, and figures like "1 to 2 percent" date from much older search engines. Write for the reader, name the topic plainly, and if a phrase starts to sound forced, it is used too often.
Can keyword stuffing get a page penalized?
Yes. Keyword stuffing is listed in Google's spam policies. Pages that do it can rank lower or, in serious cases, receive a manual action.
Should I ignore stop words?
Usually, yes. With stop words included, the top of every list is "the", "and" and "to", which says nothing about the topic. Turn the option off when your keyword itself contains a stop word you care about.
Does it count synonyms and plurals?
No. It counts exact words and phrases so the numbers are transparent. Google understands synonyms and variants well, so a page does not need to repeat one exact form.