SEO tools
Keyword Density Checker
Count what a page actually emphasises. Body copy only, with scripts, navigation and footers removed, reported as single words and as two and three-word phrases.
Why the 1-3% rule is dead
Keyword density was a real ranking factor when search engines scored documents mostly on term frequency. Three things ended that, and none of them have been reversed.
| Change | What it did |
|---|---|
| Synonym and entity matching | A page about “cars” ranks for “automobiles” without containing the word |
| BERT and neural matching | Meaning is read from context, not from repetition |
| Passage ranking | A single relevant section can rank without page-wide density |
The practical replacement for a density target is coverage: does the page discuss the things a reader searching that topic would expect to find? A page can mention its main keyword three times and rank well because it covers the subject thoroughly, while a page hitting 2.5% density says the same thin thing repeatedly.
One number here is worth watching, though: if a page has fewer than a few hundred words of body text, density figures swing wildly and mean very little. The word count itself is usually the more honest signal.
Related tools
- Heading Checker — check the structure this copy sits inside.
- SERP Preview — turn your main phrase into a title that fits.
- Slug Generator — build a clean URL from the phrase the page is really about.
Frequently asked questions
What is the ideal keyword density?
There isn't one. The 1-3% figure repeated across the SEO web is folklore from the early 2000s, when search engines really did count term frequency. Google has used semantic matching for well over a decade and no longer needs an exact-match repetition to know what a page is about. Writing to hit a percentage produces worse copy and no ranking benefit.
Then why use this tool at all?
As a diagnostic. It answers 'what does this page appear to be about, judged only by its words' — and the answer is sometimes not what you intended. If you wrote a guide to BIN lookups and the top phrase is 'sign up free', the page is emphasising the wrong thing. That is a useful signal; a target percentage is not.
Why are phrases more useful than single words?
Single words are ambiguous and dominated by whatever your topic's most common noun happens to be. Two and three-word phrases show intent: 'card' tells you little, while 'virtual card issuing' and 'card country checker' describe genuinely different pages. Real search queries are mostly multi-word too.
What counts as keyword stuffing?
Repetition that a reader would notice as unnatural — the same phrase forced into consecutive sentences, lists of city names, or text hidden with CSS. Google's guidance is behavioural rather than numeric: if removing the repetition would make the copy read better, it was stuffing.
Is navigation text included?
No. Script, style, nav, header and footer content is stripped before counting, because otherwise your menu labels would dominate the results on every page of the site. What remains is the body copy that distinguishes this page from the rest.
Why do stopwords matter?
They dominate raw frequency counts — 'the' and 'of' will always top an unfiltered list and tell you nothing. They are excluded from single-word results by default and can be toggled back on. Phrases keep them, because removing them would turn 'rate of return' into a phrase nobody searches for.