Keyword Density Checker
Paste any text and instantly see one, two, and three-word phrase frequency with stop-word filtering, density percentages, and full content statistics — no signup, no upload, runs in your browser.
Paste some content above to see phrase frequency analysis.
Keyword density is dead — here's what actually replaced it
Keyword density as a ranking factor died around 2013. The 2-3% rule that still gets repeated in beginner SEO guides is a holdover from the keyword-meta-tag era — back when search engines literally counted how many times a phrase appeared and used that as a primary signal. That era ended a long time ago. Modern Google ranks on semantic relevance, entity matching, topical authority, link signals, and user-behavior data. Counting word occurrences is so far down the list that it does not register.
And yet here we are, shipping a keyword density tool. The reason: density still works as a sanity check. Not as an optimization target — as a sanity check. If your page is supposedly about "wireless earbuds for running" and your top 1-word phrases are article, readers, and experience, something is off. Either you buried the topic, you padded the intro with filler, or you accidentally wrote a generic fitness post instead of a product-comparison page.
The modern way to use a density tool is diagnostic, not prescriptive. You write the page first, you write it for the reader, you do not think about percentages once. Then you paste it in here and check: does my target keyword show up in the top 10 phrases? Are the related entities I would expect — brands, attributes, use-cases — also there? If yes, the page is on-topic and you ship it. If no, you rewrite — not to hit a number, but because the writing genuinely missed the brief.
That is the whole modern use case. Density is not a lever you pull. It is a smoke detector that tells you when the writing drifted off-topic. Use it for that and nothing else.
What this tool actually tells you about your content
Three signals worth reading from a density report — and exactly what to do with each.
Topical centroid
The top of the 1-word and 2-word lists tell you what your page is "about" by raw frequency. If your target keyword is not in the top 10, the page reads as off-topic to a search engine — even if a human would say it covers the subject. Move the topic into more sentences, add it to a heading, mention it in the conclusion.
Phrase coverage
Look at the 2-word and 3-word phrases together. If they all repeat the same root noun — "running shoes", "running shoe", "best running shoes" — your vocabulary is shallow. Strong pages mix in semantic variations like "trainers", "footwear", "road runners", "cushioning". AI engines reward this variation explicitly.
Filler ratio
Toggle stop-word filtering off and look at what dominates. If "the", "of", and "to" together account for 25%+ of all tokens, the prose is padded. Tight, scannable copy stays under 20%. AI-generated drafts especially tend to over-use connectors. Trim them and you tighten the writing.
How to read the 2-word and 3-word phrase tabs
The single-word tab is mostly noise once stop-words are filtered. Useful, but blunt. The interesting stuff happens in the n-gram tabs — 2-word and 3-word phrases — because those reveal the natural phrasing patterns of your writing. Where the 1-gram tells you the topic, the 2-gram and 3-gram tell you how you talk about the topic.
Concrete example. You are targeting "best running shoes for flat feet". You paste your draft into the tool. The 1-word list looks fine — shoes, feet, running, arch — all on-topic. But your top 2-grams are "running shoe" (singular) and "flat foot" (singular), and your top 3-gram is "people with flat". Your target phrase appears once, in the H1. Google will still rank you — it understands singular and plural are the same thing — but you are leaving precision on the table. The fix is one or two sentences that use the exact target phrase verbatim, plus a couple of natural variations like "runners with flat arches" or "flat-footed runners".
The mistake is going the other way. Once you see the gap, the temptation is to wedge the exact 6-word phrase into every other sentence. That produces unnatural copy. AI engines actively flag pages that read as keyword-stuffed — Google has gotten better at this too. The right move is one or two natural insertions, not a sprinkle across every paragraph. If the writing sounds awkward when you read it aloud, you have over-corrected.
The 3-word tab also surfaces accidental verbal tics. If "at the end", "in this article", or "on the other" are sitting in your top 5 trigrams, the writing is leaning on connectors instead of carrying its own weight. Cut them and the page tightens up by a third without losing any actual content.
Five mistakes people make with keyword density tools
Density tools have been around since the 90s and the bad habits they teach have outlived the metric itself. Avoid these and you will get useful diagnostic value out of the report instead of optimizing for a number that does not matter.
Optimizing toward a target percentage
There is no magic number. Not 1%, not 2%, not 3%. Hitting any specific density does not improve rankings — and chasing one almost always produces awkward, repetitive prose that hurts engagement. Read the report, sanity-check the topic, then close the tab. Do not edit the page to chase a digit.
Ignoring stop-word noise on the first read
With the filter off, your top results will always be "the", "of", "and". That is true of every English text and tells you nothing. Always run the analysis with stop-word filtering on for content judgments. Only turn it off when you are specifically diagnosing whether your prose is over-padded with connectors.
Treating singular and plural as different phrases
This tool keeps them separate by design — "running shoe" and "running shoes" show up as two rows. That is a limitation, not a feature. Google treats them as the same lemma. When you read the report, mentally collapse close variants together before deciding the page is missing coverage.
Forgetting that headers and image alt text count
A density check on body copy alone misses the H1, the H2s, and the alt attributes — all of which carry weight. Before pasting, copy the visible text plus the alt text on every image. The first time you do this for a real page you will be surprised how much your headings dominate the actual on-page content.
Running density on the wrong text
Pasting raw HTML or a full page-source dump pollutes the analysis with menu items, footer links, and sidebar widgets. Use the rendered article text only. View the page in reader mode (Safari Reader, Chrome Reading Mode) and copy from there — that gives you the cleanest input.
Density is a smoke detector — not a strategy
For real content optimization, you need entity coverage and semantic depth.
Keyword density only tells you what your page repeats. It does not tell you what your page is missing. Two articles about "email marketing" can have identical density profiles and very different topical coverage — one mentions deliverability, segmentation, lifecycle, and authentication, the other talks about "email marketing" ten times and nothing else. Google and AI engines can tell the difference. A density tool cannot.
The next step beyond density is entity coverage: comparing your page against the top-ranking competitors for your target query and finding which sub-topics, related entities, and supporting questions you have not addressed. That is where real content gaps hide, and that is what actually moves rankings in 2026.
RankNow.ai's AEO Analyzer does that comparison automatically, including testing how AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews respond to your target prompts. Density is the smoke detector. AEO Analyzer is the building inspector.
Keyword Density FAQ
Everything we get asked about phrase frequency, n-grams, and modern on-page SEO.
Contact SupportThere is no ideal number. The old advice of 1-3% comes from the late-1990s era when search engines literally counted keyword occurrences as a ranking signal. Modern Google uses semantic relevance, entity recognition, and topical coverage — not raw frequency. If you must have a guideline, aim for natural usage where your primary phrase appears in the title, the first 100 words, at least one heading, and a few times in the body. Stop trying to hit a specific percentage; write for the reader and the density takes care of itself.
Google does not have a hardcoded penalty triggered by hitting a particular percentage. What it does penalize — algorithmically and sometimes manually — is keyword stuffing, which is the visible result of trying too hard to repeat a phrase. Spam team guidelines explicitly call out unnatural repetition that adds no value for the reader. So a 6% density on a thoughtful 2,000-word guide is fine; a 6% density on a 300-word landing page where the same phrase appears in every other sentence will probably get demoted.
Yes — but for a different reason than density tools imply. Putting your target phrase in the opening paragraph signals topical relevance to both Google and AI engines that lean on the first chunk of text for summarization. It also confirms to readers within two seconds that the page is about what they searched for, which lowers bounce rate. One natural use of the exact phrase plus one variation in the first 100 words is enough.
Keyword density measures one document in isolation: count of phrase divided by total tokens. TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) compares your document against a corpus, weighting terms higher when they appear often in your page but rarely in the corpus overall. TF-IDF is closer to how modern retrieval systems actually score relevance, but it requires a reference corpus to mean anything. This tool only does density because it runs entirely in your browser with no backend lookup.
Because density is not a ranking factor. The pages above you probably have stronger backlink profiles, better internal linking, deeper topical coverage across related pages, faster Core Web Vitals, fresher content, or all of the above. Density is at most a sanity check that your page is on-topic — it is never the lever that moves you from page two to page one. If you are stuck, audit links, intent match, and content depth before you touch the word counts.
Yes for the analysis to be meaningful — paste the visible body text plus the heading text and the alt text. Search engines do read alt attributes and heading content, and both carry slightly more weight than body copy for relevance signals. This tool only sees what you paste in, so include everything that contributes to the on-page experience: H1, H2s, body, alt text, and any captions. Skip nav menus, footer boilerplate, and sidebar widgets.
Less than for Google, and that is saying something. AI engines extract facts and synthesize answers — they care about entity coverage, factual density, source authority, and structured data far more than raw word frequency. A page that mentions your target topic clearly once and supports it with related entities, statistics, and proper schema will outperform a page that repeats the same phrase 50 times. Use density as a quick smell test, then move on to entity coverage and schema markup.
Replace direct repetitions with pronouns ("it", "this approach"), synonyms, and related terms. If your target is "email marketing automation", swap in "automated drip campaigns", "sequenced sends", or "lifecycle messaging" where they fit. Also break up heavy paragraphs with examples, screenshots, and quotes — these add length and dilute density without adding filler. The goal is not lower density for its own sake, it is more readable copy.
Yes, the tokenizer splits on whitespace and punctuation so it works for any language that uses Latin or extended-Latin scripts (English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, etc.). The built-in stop-word list is English-only — turn the stop-word filter off when analyzing other languages or you will leak common articles into the results. Languages without space-delimited words (Chinese, Japanese, Thai) will not tokenize correctly and need a dedicated tool.
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Density is the smoke detector. Want the full content audit?
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