Keyword Density Checker
Paste a draft and see how long it is, how long it takes to read and which words and phrases you use most.
Words
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Characters
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No spaces
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Sentences
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Unique words
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Reading time
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What keyword density is good for
Keyword density is the share of a text taken up by one word or phrase. Twenty years ago people tuned it to a fixed percentage. That stopped working long ago, and search engines treat heavy repetition as keyword stuffing, which is covered by Google's spam policies.
The number is still useful as an editing aid:
- Spot overuse. If a three word phrase shows up 14 times in 600 words, readers notice. Replace some mentions with a pronoun or a synonym.
- Check the topic. The top phrases should describe what the page is about. If the list for a page about trail running shoes is led by "free shipping", the copy has drifted.
- Find missing terms. Compare your list with the vocabulary of pages that rank. The point is coverage of subtopics, not copying frequencies.
- Hit length limits. Word and character counts help with briefs, ad copy and meta descriptions.
How the numbers are produced
The text is lower-cased and split into words. Hyphenated words and contractions stay in one piece. Sentences are counted at full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. Reading time assumes 230 words per minute.
Two and three word phrases are counted with a sliding window over the text and listed when they occur at least twice.
Where the target keyword should appear
Placement matters more than frequency: the title tag, the H1, the first paragraph and the URL. Preview the title with the SERP snippet preview, check headings on a live page with the heading structure checker, and create a short URL with the slug generator.
When the page is published, TurboIndex can submit it to Google and report when it gets indexed.
Questions and answers
What is a good keyword density?
There is no target number. Google has said repeatedly that it does not use keyword density as a ranking factor. Use the figure as a warning light: if one phrase clearly dominates the list and the text sounds repetitive when you read it aloud, rewrite it.
How is density calculated?
Occurrences of the phrase divided by the total number of words in the text, times 100. For the target keyword field, a multi-word phrase counts each of its words, so a two word phrase that appears 5 times in 500 words has a density of 2%.
What does the stop word filter do?
It hides very common English words such as the, and, of and is from the one word list, and hides longer phrases that begin or end with such a word. Word count and density are still based on all words.
Is my text sent to a server?
No. The analysis runs in your browser with JavaScript. You can disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded and it still works.