Keyword Density Analyzer

Keyword Density Analyzer

Paste any text and get a sorted word frequency table with density percentages. Words appearing more than 3% of the time are highlighted as potentially over-optimized.

How keyword density is calculated

Density = (word occurrences / total words) × 100

Example: if "SEO" appears 5 times in a 200-word article, its density is 5/200 × 100 = 2.5%.

What is a healthy keyword density?

There is no universally agreed optimal density. Google has repeatedly stated it does not use keyword density as a ranking factor. However, as a rough guide:

• 1-2%: natural, readable density for most keywords
• 2-3%: acceptable for a primary keyword on a focused page
• Above 3%: risks sounding unnatural or keyword-stuffed

Write for humans first. If a keyword appears naturally at the density your content requires, that is fine. Keyword stuffing, forcing repetitions that sound unnatural, is a spam signal that can harm rankings.

Stop word filtering

Stop words (the, and, is, in, a, etc.) are common words that carry little meaning for keyword analysis. Enabling the stop word filter removes them from the frequency table, making it easier to spot meaningful keyword usage. This tool includes stop word lists for English and French.

Tips

• Analyze the top 5-10 meaningful words, these are the topics your content covers
• If your primary keyword appears too few times, consider adding it naturally in subheadings or the introduction
• Use synonyms and related terms (LSI keywords) to add semantic richness without forcing repetitions

Why the 1-3% rule is outdated, and what Google actually uses

The 1-3% keyword density "rule" originates from early 2000s SEO and has no technical basis in how modern search engines work. Google's John Mueller has stated on multiple occasions that keyword density is not a ranking signal Google uses.

What Google actually computes is closer to TF-IDF (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency): a score that measures how important a word is in a document relative to how common it is across all documents on the web. A word that appears frequently in your page but rarely across the web ranks high in TF-IDF, even if its raw density is low. Common words (the, and, is) have near-zero TF-IDF regardless of frequency.

In practice: write naturally, cover the topic thoroughly, and use related terms (synonyms, semantic variants). A thin 300-word page with 3% density will not outrank a thorough 1500-word page with 1% density on a competitive topic. The density percentage this tool shows is useful for spotting accidental repetitions, not for hitting a target number.

UK-relevant SEO tools that go beyond raw density: Ahrefs (popular in UK agencies), Semrush, Moz. For SERP analysis specific to Google.co.uk results, these tools support market-level data filtering.