Developer Keyword density checker
Analyse which words and phrases dominate a piece of copy, check a specific target keyword, and see whether anything reads as overused.
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Reembun. (2026, July 28). Keyword density checker. https://reembun.com/keyword-density-checker
How to use it
Paste the page copy
Body text only. Navigation, footers and boilerplate will skew every number here.
Choose a phrase length
Single words, two words or three words. Most real search phrases are two or three words long, not one.
Decide about filler words
Include filler words counts the, and, of and the rest. Leave it off to see the phrases that carry meaning.
Read the table
Each phrase shows its count and its share of the text. Treat anything unusually high as a prompt to rewrite, not a target to reach.
What density measures
density = occurrences ÷ total words × 100For a phrase, the denominator is the number of possible positions the phrase could occupy, which is slightly fewer than the word count.
What it is actually good for
Not hitting a target. Three genuine uses:
Finding a page that never says what it is about. Pages written to avoid repetition sometimes avoid the subject entirely. If a page about mortgage calculators mentions “mortgage” twice in a thousand words, that is worth knowing.
Spotting genuine overuse. A term at 4% or 5% reads badly. Not because of a penalty, but because a human notices and it feels like being sold to.
Catching verbal tics. Turn filler words on and you often find “actually”, “really” or “just” appearing far more than you intended.
The history, and why it stopped mattering
In the late 1990s search engines did count term frequency directly, and density was a real lever. That produced keyword stuffing, which produced the algorithmic responses that killed it: Florida in 2003, then Panda in 2011, then a decade of semantic understanding.
Modern ranking systems work on what a page is about, using entity recognition and contextual embeddings. A page can rank for a phrase it never contains verbatim, and repeating a phrase does not make it more relevant.
Density persists in SEO tooling largely out of habit, and it is still worth looking at for the diagnostic reasons above.
Phrase length
| Length | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| One word | Broad topical focus |
| Two words | Most commercial search queries |
| Three words | Long-tail queries and natural phrasing |
Two-word phrases are usually the most informative, because that is the shape of most queries with commercial intent.
Reference ranges
| Density | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Under 0.5% | Possibly off-topic, or avoiding the subject |
| 0.5% to 2.5% | Natural |
| 2.5% to 3% | Noticeable on close reading |
| Over 3% | Strained |
These describe how text reads, not thresholds anything enforces.
What to do instead
Cover the topic properly. A page that answers the questions someone actually has will naturally contain the relevant vocabulary, including related terms, subtopics, and the specific numbers and names a knowledgeable writer would use, without anyone counting anything.
If you want a structural check rather than a frequency one, ask whether the target phrase appears in the title, the H1, the first hundred words and at least one subheading. That is worth more than any density figure, and it is a checklist rather than a ratio.
Common questions
What is a good keyword density?
There is no target, and treating one as a target produces worse writing. Between roughly 0.5% and 2.5% is what naturally-written copy about a topic tends to land on. Above about 3% the text starts reading as strained to a human long before it registers as a problem to a search engine.
Does Google rank on keyword density?
No, and it has not for well over a decade. Modern ranking uses semantic understanding of a page's topic rather than counting term occurrences. Density is useful as a diagnostic, spotting a page that never says what it is about, or one where a word has been repeated badly, but not as a lever.
Why check two and three word phrases?
Because that is how people search. Single-word counts tell you a page mentions "compressor" a lot; phrase counts tell you whether it says "image compressor", which is the query. Phrases are also where unintentional repetition is most visible.
Should I include filler words?
Usually not for analysis, since "the" being the most frequent word tells you nothing. Turn them on when you are checking for verbal tics or when analysing text in a language whose stop words are not in the built-in English list.
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