Paste a page address or your own draft and see which words and phrases you actually used, how many times, and at what density. Single words, two-word phrases and three-word phrases. Free, no sign-up.
Check the keyword density of any page
Enter a URL and the tool reads the live page, strips out the code and counts what is left. You get three tabs, single words, two-word phrases and three-word phrases, plus the page’s title, meta description and H1, with their character counts.
That last part is often the more useful half. A page can mention its topic thirty times in the body and still leave it out of the title, which is the one place it matters most.
What is keyword density in SEO?
Keyword density is simply how often a word appears, as a percentage of the total words on the page. Use a keyword 10 times in a 1,000-word article and its density is 1%.
It was one of the earliest SEO metrics, from a time when search engines really did count words. Modern search does not work that way, so density is no longer a score to hit. What it still is, and this is worth keeping, is a quick way to see what your page is actually about, in the page’s own words rather than your intentions.
What is a good keyword density?
There is no target number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Google has never published a density figure, and the old advice of “1-2%” was folklore, not policy.
Read the report as a diagnosis instead of a score:
- Your main topic does not appear near the top of the list. The page is probably about something vaguer than you planned, or it hides the subject behind clever wording.
- One phrase is far ahead of everything else. Read those sentences aloud. If they sound repetitive to you, they read that way to everyone.
- The list is all generic business words, solutions, services, quality, and nothing concrete. The page says little that a reader could act on.
- The phrases look right and read naturally. Nothing to fix. Move on.
Keyword density calculator for your own drafts
Switch to My own text and paste a draft before you publish it. This is the better moment to look: it is easier to reword a paragraph now than to edit a live page later.
A quick pre-publish check: does your target keyword appear in the top few rows? Do the two- and three-word phrases match the subject a reader searched for? If the phrase list surprises you, the page will surprise Google too.
How to avoid keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is repeating a term to influence rankings rather than to help the reader. Google names it as spam in its own guidelines, so this is one of the few places where the old advice still holds: do not do it.
The honest test is not a percentage, it is a sentence. Read the lines containing your top phrase out loud. If you would not say them to a customer, rewrite them. Synonyms, plain pronouns and simply leaving a term out of a sentence all work, the page does not need the keyword in every paragraph to be about it.
Word count and keyword frequency
Above the table you also get the total word count and how many unique words the page uses. Together they say something density alone cannot: a 2,000-word page with only 300 unique words is padded, and padding is visible to readers long before it matters to a search engine.
The Times used column is the raw frequency: sometimes more useful than the percentage, because “used 14 times” lands harder than “1.2%”.
When a page comes back empty
The checker reads the HTML a server returns. Pages built entirely in JavaScript often return an empty shell, so they look wordless here even though they are full in a browser. Pages behind a login or a bot block cannot be read at all.
The way around it is simple: open the page in your browser, select the text, copy it, and use the My own text mode instead.
More free keyword tools
- Keyword search volume checker: find out whether anyone searches for the terms your page is built on.
- Competitor keyword finder: see the keyword ideas behind any website or page.
- SEO keyword suggestion tool: the related terms a complete page usually covers.
Frequently asked questions
There is no official number. Google has never published a target and the old 1 to 2 percent rule was folklore. Use the report to check that your page reads naturally and covers its topic, not to hit a percentage.
Not as a ranking number. It is still useful as a quick diagnosis of what a page is actually about, and for catching repetition you cannot see while writing.
Times the word or phrase appears, divided by the number of word positions on the page, shown as a percentage. Two and three word phrases are counted the same way across every position in the text.
Repeating a term to influence rankings rather than to help the reader. Google lists it as spam. If a sentence sounds odd when you read it aloud, that is the signal.
The checker reads the HTML your server returns. Pages rendered entirely in JavaScript look empty to it, and pages behind a login cannot be read. Copy the text and use the “My own text” mode instead.
Yes. Choose “My own text” and paste the draft. Nothing is stored: the text is counted and the result is sent straight back to you.
The “ignore common words” box is ticked by default, because those words top every list and tell you nothing. Untick it to see the raw counts.