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Keyword Density Checker

Measure exact keyword density, spot over-optimisation risks, and see where your target phrase appears on the page.

Analysing text…
# Phrase Count SEO Density Raw Density Status
Density thresholds are heuristic guidelines, not ranking rules. Context, intent and competition always matter more than raw percentages.

What is Keyword Density — and Why It Matters

Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific word or phrase appears in a text relative to the total word count. It has been a core concept in SEO for two decades — but it is widely misunderstood. A high density is not automatically good, and a low one is not automatically bad. The real question is whether your target phrase appears naturally in the right places: the title, H1, opening paragraph, and body copy.

This tool separates raw density (based on all words) from SEO density (based on meaningful words only, with stop words removed). The SEO density figure is closer to how search engines evaluate term frequency, because function words like "the", "and", or "of" dilute the signal without adding semantic value.

Lemmatisation takes this further: instead of counting "audit", "auditing", and "audited" separately, the tool recognises them as the same root and combines their frequency. This gives you a more accurate picture of how strongly a topic is represented in the text.

How to Use the Keyword Density Checker

  1. Choose Paste Text to analyse raw copy, or Analyse URL to fetch and analyse a live page.
  2. Enter your target keyword (optional but recommended) — a word or phrase you are trying to rank for.
  3. Click Analyse. The tool tokenises the text, removes stop words, lemmatises tokens and counts n-grams.
  4. Review the Target Keyword block: it shows exact and lemma match counts, density, and placement signals — is the keyword in the title, H1, meta description, and first 100 words?
  5. Browse the 1-word / 2-word / 3-word tabs to see which terms dominate the text. Watch for unintended repetition of words that are not your target keyword.
  6. Use the Status indicators (normal / high / risky) to spot over-optimisation before publishing.
  7. Export to CSV if you want to paste the data into a report or spreadsheet.

Understanding Density Thresholds

There are no official Google guidelines on keyword density. The thresholds used by this tool are heuristic benchmarks based on industry research and content analysis:

  • 1-gram (single words): below 0.5% is low, 0.5–2.5% is normal, 2.5–4% is elevated, above 4% is risky.
  • 2-gram (two-word phrases): up to 1.5% is normal, above 2% is risky.
  • 3-gram (three-word phrases): up to 1% is normal, above 1.5% is risky.

These thresholds become less meaningful for very short texts (under 200 words) or for branded pages where repetition of a brand name is natural and expected. Always interpret density in context — a single risky figure is not a problem if the text reads naturally.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between raw density and SEO density?
Raw density is calculated against all words in the text, including stop words like "the", "and", "in". SEO density is calculated against meaningful words only — after stop words are removed. SEO density is the more actionable figure because it reflects how often a term appears in semantically relevant context, which is closer to how search engines score term frequency.
What are n-grams and why does the tool show 1, 2 and 3-word results?
An n-gram is a sequence of n consecutive words. Unigrams (1-word) show which individual terms dominate. Bigrams (2-word) reveal the most common two-word combinations — these often correspond to long-tail keyword targets. Trigrams (3-word) surface specific phrases that may indicate semantic focus or accidental repetition. Reviewing all three gives a complete picture of keyword distribution.
Does a high keyword density improve rankings?
No — and it can actively harm them. Google's algorithms have been sophisticated enough for years to detect keyword stuffing, and high-density pages can be demoted or filtered. What matters is that the target keyword appears naturally in strategic positions: the title tag, H1, meta description, and within the first 100 words of the body. After that, semantic variety (related terms, synonyms) is more valuable than repetition.
What languages does the tool support?
The Keyword Density Checker supports English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Language is detected automatically from the input text, or you can select it manually. Stop-word filtering and lemmatisation are applied per language — Russian and Ukrainian use pymorphy3 for morphological analysis, English uses a Snowball stemmer. For URL mode, the page language is detected independently from the HTML content.
How does the URL mode work?
When you enter a URL, the tool fetches the page HTML and extracts text from different zones: title tag, meta description, H1, subheadings (H2–H4), and main body content. Navigation, footer, scripts, and boilerplate are stripped out. This gives a clean representation of what search engines actually read. The target keyword placement report then checks each zone separately — so you can see immediately whether the keyword appears in the title but is missing from H1.
What does the stop-word ratio tell me?
The stop-word ratio (shown in the summary as "Stop-word ratio") is the percentage of words in the text that are function words with no semantic value. A healthy range is roughly 30–55%. Above 60%, the text likely contains padding, filler phrases, or overly complex sentence structures that dilute the core message. Below 25%, the text may read robotically — like a list of keywords rather than natural prose.