Keyword Density Checker

How to use the keyword density checker

1. Paste the page text or its HTML. Tags, scripts and styles are stripped before counting.
2. Enter the keywords you expect the page to rank for, separated by commas. Multi-word phrases are matched as whole phrases, in order.
3. Choose whether to list single words, two-word or three-word phrases. Two-word phrases are usually the most revealing.
4. Read the assessment column. The tool flags terms that are absent, rare, or repeated so often that the writing sounds mechanical.
5. Use the highlighted text at the bottom to see where the keywords sit. The first mention should be early, in the opening lines.

What density actually tells you

Keyword density is not a ranking factor and there is no target percentage that makes a page rank. What the numbers do reveal is whether a page is about what you think it is about. If the phrase you want to rank for appears once in 1,500 words, the page is probably about something else. If it appears thirty times, the writing has been bent around the keyword and readers will notice.

The percentages here are calculated against the number of possible positions for a phrase of that length, so a two-word phrase and a single word are on the same scale. Stop words such as “the” and “of” are excluded from the frequency list by default because they dominate every text and tell you nothing.

A more useful reading is the shape of the frequency table. On a page that genuinely covers a topic, the top phrases are the topic, its sub-topics and the entities involved. On a thin or padded page, the top phrases are the same keyword in slightly different forms.

Writing for a topic rather than a keyword

• Use the exact phrase where it naturally belongs: the title, the H1, the first paragraph and perhaps one H2. After that, refer to the subject the way a person would, with pronouns, synonyms and specific terms.
• Cover the sub-topics a searcher expects. A page about Shopify SEO that never mentions collections, product schema or duplicate URLs is thin no matter how often it says “Shopify SEO”.
• Name the entities involved: tools, platforms, places, regulations, people. Search engines use those to understand context.
• Watch sentence length. Averages above 25 words usually mean the copy is hard to read on a phone.
• If the tool shows a keyword is absent, do not just insert it. Ask whether the page should exist for that keyword at all.

Related tools

Background reading: why topic coverage beats repetition, in the SEO copywriting guide.