How to use the keyword density checker
- 1Choose Paste text and paste your copy, or choose Check a URL and press Fetch text.
- 2Pick a Phrase length: 1 word, 2 words or 3 words.
- 3Adjust Minimum occurrences and Ignore stop words; add phrases under Track specific keywords to count them exactly.
- 4Read the table, then Copy it or download it as CSV.
Example
A sourdough starter is a mix of flour and water. Feed your sourdough starter every day. A healthy sourdough starter doubles in size. Keep the starter in a warm place, and feed the starter flour and water.
Total words: 37 1 word: starter 5 (13.51%) · sourdough 3 (8.11%) · feed 2 (5.41%) · flour 2 (5.41%) · water 2 (5.41%) 2 words: sourdough starter 3 (16.22%) 3 words: flour and water 2 (16.22%)
"Starter" makes up 13.5% of a short paragraph: a sign to vary the wording ("it", "the culture") if it reads repetitively. Stop words are ignored and the minimum count is 2.
How keyword density is calculated
Density = occurrences × words in the phrase ÷ total words × 100. It's the share of your text that the word or phrase takes up. In a 37-word paragraph, a word used 5 times has a density of 5 ÷ 37 = 13.5%; a two-word phrase used 3 times covers 6 of the 37 words, 16.2%.
Words are runs of letters or digits; hyphenated words and contractions count as one word, and matching ignores capital letters. Phrases are counted within sentences only, so a phrase never spans a full stop.
One-, two- and three-word phrases
Single words show which terms dominate, but people search in phrases. Switch to 2 words to see pairs such as "sourdough starter", and 3 words for longer phrases ("flour and water"). If a two-word phrase appears far more often than its words do separately, you may be repeating an exact keyword where a natural variation would read better. To count specific phrases regardless of the table, list them under Track specific keywords.
Stop words and filters
Stop words (the, and, of, to, is…) are the most common words in any English text and say nothing about the topic. With Ignore stop words on, single stop words are hidden and phrases that start or end with one are skipped; phrases with a stop word in the middle ("flour and water") are kept. Minimum occurrences hides one-off words, and Minimum word length hides very short words. The total word count always includes every word.
Is there an ideal keyword density?
No. Google doesn't use a target density, and nothing in its documentation suggests one. Repeating a keyword unnaturally is listed as keyword stuffing in Google's spam policies, but there's no percentage where that starts; it depends on the length and type of text. Use the numbers to find words you've overused, not to hit a figure such as "2%".
Better signals than density
What helps a page rank for a topic is covering it well: answering the question the searcher has, using the vocabulary people naturally use (synonyms, related terms, specific details), and putting the main topic in the title, H1 and opening paragraph. Check those with the meta tags analyzer and heading checker, and find related phrasings with the keyword ideas generator.
Is my text private?
To check a URL, our server requests the address you enter and returns the result to you. We don't store the pages we fetch or keep a list of the addresses you check. If you paste HTML or text instead, it is processed in your browser and not sent to us. Like any website, our hosting provider keeps short-lived technical request logs for security. See the privacy policy.