What Is Keyword Density?
Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific word or phrase appears in a piece of content, relative to the total number of words. It's calculated as:
Keyword Density = (Keyword Count ÷ Total Words) × 100
How to Use This Tool
- Paste your content — articles, blog posts, web pages, essays.
- Filter stopwords — remove common words like "the", "and", "is".
- Choose n-gram length — 1-word keywords, 2-word phrases, or 3-word phrases.
- Optional: enable stemming — treats "run", "running", "runs" as the same word.
- Click Analyze — see frequency, density, and charts.
- Export CSV — get a spreadsheet of all keywords for further analysis.
What's a Good Keyword Density?
There's no single "magic number", but general guidelines are:
- 0.5% to 1.5% — ideal range for most primary keywords
- 1.5% to 2.5% — acceptable but slightly heavy; may raise flags
- Above 3% — likely to be seen as keyword stuffing
- Below 0.5% — may not signal relevance to search engines
Modern SEO isn't about hitting a specific density — it's about natural, useful writing. Google's algorithms use semantic understanding, not raw frequency counts.
Why Density Still Matters
Even though modern search engines are more sophisticated, keyword density remains useful for:
- Catching accidental repetition — you might use a word unconsciously
- Checking topic focus — do your top keywords match your intended topic?
- Guarding against keyword stuffing — content that repeats too much looks spammy
- Identifying missing keywords — if a concept you write about never appears, add it
- Content audits — compare density across similar pages
What Are Stopwords?
Stopwords are common words — like "the", "and", "of", "is", "at", "to" — that search engines typically ignore. They dominate raw word counts without adding meaning. This tool includes a built-in list of 100+ English stopwords, plus you can add your own custom ones.
Filtering stopwords reveals the content words — the words that actually matter for topic analysis.
N-Gram Analysis
An n-gram is a sequence of N consecutive words. This tool supports:
- 1-grams (unigrams) — single keywords. What are you talking about most?
- 2-grams (bigrams) — word pairs. Reveals common phrases and collocations.
- 3-grams (trigrams) — 3-word phrases. Captures longer expressions and named entities.
Bigrams and trigrams are especially useful for SEO — many queries are multi-word phrases like "concrete driveway cost" or "how to paint cabinets".
Stemming Explained
Stemming reduces words to their root form so variations count as one:
- Without stemming — "run", "running", "runs" count separately
- With stemming — all three count as "run"
This tool uses a lightweight stemmer that handles most English plurals and verb endings. It's not perfect — some edge cases may not reduce cleanly — but it's useful for topic analysis.
Common Use Cases
- SEO writers — verify keyword usage before publishing
- Content editors — catch over-repetition of a single term
- Bloggers — check that your content stays on-topic
- Copywriters — refine ad copy and sales pages
- Students — analyze academic writing for word overuse
- Translators — ensure terminology consistency
- Marketers — audit competitor content for keyword patterns
Reading the Results
- Count — how many times the word appears
- Density — count as a percentage of total words
- Color coding — green (healthy), yellow (moderate), red (possibly too high)
- Sort any column — click the header to sort ascending or descending
- Top 15 chart — visual bar chart of the most frequent terms
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does Google use keyword density as a ranking factor? — Not directly. Google uses semantic analysis and user signals. But density still reflects content focus.
- Should I target a specific density? — No. Focus on writing naturally, and use this tool to catch accidental over-repetition.
- What about LSI keywords? — Related terms matter. This tool's bigram/trigram views help surface them.
- Does capitalization matter? — No. Words are normalized to lowercase before counting.
- What if my content has numbers or symbols? — They're stripped during tokenization. Only letters are counted.
- Is this tool free? — Yes, completely free with no limits.
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