Keyword Density Checker

What the Keyword Density Checker Does

Drop in an article or page copy and you get a live table: the 20 most frequent words, how many times each appears, and its density as a percentage of the total word count. It is a fast way to spot a word you have leaned on too hard, or to confirm your main topic actually shows up in the text.

It counts single words, lowercased, and ignores words shorter than three letters in the results — so the table surfaces real words rather than a, is or to. Because it does not strip common words, though, frequent function words like the and and usually sit at the top.

How It Works

As you type or paste, the tool lowercases the text and splits it into words (letters, digits and apostrophes), counts the total, then tallies each word that is three letters or longer. It sorts the tally, takes the top 20, and shows each word's density as its count divided by the total word count, times 100.

The total in the denominator includes every word — even the short ones left out of the table — so the percentages describe each word's share of the whole text. There is no phrase analysis: running and shoes are counted separately, never as the phrase running shoes.

What it checks & how

1. Split into words. Lowercase the text and break it into words made of letters, digits and apostrophes.
2. Count the total. Tally every word — including short ones — for the denominator.
3. Tally words of 3+ letters. Count how often each word of three or more letters appears, ignoring one- and two-letter words.
4. Rank and show density. Sort by count, take the top 20, and show each word's count divided by the total, as a percentage.

Keyword density

The total counts every word, including the short ones left out of the table, so densities describe each word's share of the whole text.

Technical Details

Standards & references

• Not a ranking factor — Google's John Mueller has said keyword density is not a ranking factor and never has been; there is no target percentage to hit.
• Keyword stuffing — loading a page with repeated keywords to manipulate rankings is against Google's spam policies — high density is a risk, not a goal.
• Single-word counts — this tool measures one-word (unigram) density; it does not score two- or three-word phrases, and it does not remove common words.

Accuracy & Limitations

Keyword density is not a Google ranking factor. There is no ideal percentage — the old 1-3% or under-1% figures are folklore, not Google rules. Use the table to catch over-repetition and to confirm your topic appears, not to hit a number.

It does not remove stop words, so the most frequent words are usually the, and, for and other function words rather than your keywords. Read past them to the meaningful terms.

It counts single words only. A two-word target like running shoes is split into running and shoes, so the tool cannot tell you the density of the phrase itself.

Words shorter than three letters are left out of the table but still counted in the total. That keeps the list readable, but it means a short keyword — an acronym like AI or UX — will not appear even if you use it often.

Forms of a word count separately. run, runs and running are three different rows, so a topic spread across word forms looks less dense than it reads. Tokenisation also splits hyphenated words, so state-of-the-art becomes four words.

Real-World Use Cases

When to use it — and when not to

Want to know if your content covers a topic well? Look at topical coverage and search intent, not density. Need phrase frequency or stop-word filtering? A dedicated n-gram or text-analysis tool does that. Checking length? Use a word counter.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

• Keyword Density: Is It A Google Ranking Factor? (Search Engine Journal)
• Spam policies for Google web search — keyword stuffing (Google Search Central)
• Keyword Density: What Is It & Does It Impact SEO? (Semrush)

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