Free Keyword Density Checker
Paste content to see how often words and phrases appear, including counts and percentage density.
Common stop words are excluded. Analyzed entirely in your browser.
Keyword Density Checker counts how often each word and phrase appears in a piece of text, helping you spot unintentional keyword stuffing or confirm a target keyword appears often enough without overdoing it.
What is keyword density, and how is it actually calculated?
Keyword density is the percentage of words on a page represented by a particular keyword or phrase — a basic content-analysis metric rather than something modern SEO targets directly. To calculate it, divide how many times a keyword appears by the total word count and multiply by 100; that's different from raw keyword frequency, which is just the plain count of appearances before it's expressed as a percentage.
Is there a good keyword density target, and does it actually affect Google rankings?
No — there's no universal percentage that guarantees rankings, and Google doesn't recommend targeting a specific density at all. Focus on natural language and clear topic coverage instead of a target number; very frequent, unnatural repetition can actually work against you by reading as keyword stuffing rather than helpful content.
What is keyword stuffing, and how do you actually avoid it?
Keyword stuffing is the excessive or unnatural use of keywords in content or metadata — it hurts readability and can violate search-engine spam policies, and yes, it can genuinely hurt SEO by making content less useful to actual readers. The fix is straightforward: write for the reader first, let keywords fit naturally where they belong, and use synonyms and related terms rather than repeating the exact same phrase over and over.
Should you focus on keyword density or search intent — and does density even matter for AI search?
Search intent should be the real priority — use keywords naturally while making sure the content actually satisfies what someone is looking for, rather than optimizing for a percentage. There's no known ideal keyword density for AI-generated answers either; natural topical coverage matters more than repetitive insertion. What actually helps is semantic optimization — covering the related concepts, terminology and questions that explain a topic comprehensively, which a density checker can hint at by surfacing frequently occurring related terms, though that's different from full keyword research.
Where did the whole idea of 'optimizing' a page for search engines even come from?
The term "search engine optimization" itself dates to 1997 — early enough that credit for coining it is still genuinely disputed. John Audette of the Multimedia Marketing Group is often credited with popularizing the phrase that February while working on a client's website, and separately, Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Watch, has pointed to SEO practitioner Bruce Clay as one of the earliest people using the term around the same time. What's not disputed is the timing: 1997 was when marketers first started deliberately reverse-engineering how search engines like the newly-launched Google (1998) and its predecessors ranked pages — and keyword density, crude as it seems today, was one of the very first metrics anyone tried to game, which is exactly why search engines eventually stopped rewarding it at all.
Is Keyword Density Checker free to use?
Yes. Keyword Density Checker is completely free, with no sign-up and no usage limits.
Do I need to install any software?
No. Keyword Density Checker runs directly in your web browser — nothing to download or install.
Is my data kept private?
Everything happens on your device. We never receive or store the file or text you enter into Keyword Density Checker.