Keyword density checker — analyze your content for SEO balance
See the most-used words in your text, their counts, and their density percentage. Useful for spotting overuse, underuse, and verifying topical focus. Stopwords filtered automatically.
- Top 10 most-frequent words with density %
- Stopwords automatically excluded
- Pair with readability for full content audit
- No signup, runs in your browser
What keyword density tells you
Keyword density is one of the oldest SEO metrics. In the early 2000s, search engines weighed exact-match keyword frequency heavily, leading to keyword-stuffed text that was unreadable. Modern search engines (since BERT in 2019) understand semantic relationships, so density matters less — but it’s still a useful audit signal.
Density tells you two things:
- Topical focus.If your target keyword appears 0 times in a 1,500-word article, you don’t have a topical focus. Even Google’s semantic systems need some direct keyword presence to identify the target topic.
- Overuse signals. If your keyword density is 5% or more, your text reads unnaturally. Modern systems flag this as low-quality content even when topic relevance is high.
What density to target
- Primary keyword: 0.5–2.5%.For a 1,000-word article, that’s 5–25 occurrences. Land in this range through natural writing, not deliberate insertion.
- Secondary keywords: 0.3–1.5%. Related terms, synonyms, sub-topics. These together do most of the topical signaling.
- Don’t cross 3% for any single keyword. At that density, the text reads unnaturally and spam-detection algorithms notice.
Density vs. topical completeness
Modern SEO has shifted from “hit this keyword X times” to “cover this topic comprehensively.” A page targeting “readability checker” should not just mention that phrase 10 times — it should also discuss Flesch, SMOG, grade level, sentence length, complex words, audience matching, and so on. Together these signals tell Google the page is a comprehensive resource, not a thin keyword target.
The keyword density check is one input to this audit. Combine it with:
- Readability check— is the writing accessible?
- Top-ranking competitor analysis— what related terms do they cover that you don’t?
- Header structure (H2/H3) audit— does your outline cover the sub-topics?
How to use the density report
- Find your target keyword in the list. Is it in the top 5–10? If not, you may have topical-focus issues.
- Check the density. Within 0.5–2.5%? Good. Over 3%? Reduce. Under 0.3%? Add a few more natural mentions.
- Look at unexpected entries.If a generic verb like “helps” or “makes” tops your list, that’s a writing tic to fix.
- Confirm semantic coverage. Are related terms present? Audit against competitor outlines.