A keyword density checker counts how often every word and phrase appears in your text and expresses each one as a percentage of the total word count. Paste any article, landing page or blog draft into the box above and the analysis runs live as you type: total words, unique words, characters and estimated reading time up top, then ranked frequency tables for the top single words, 2-word and 3-word phrases — each with its raw count and density percentage. Set an optional target keyword and you get a dedicated tile with its occurrence count, density and an honest verdict on whether the repetition reads natural or stuffed. Everything runs in your browser — free, no signup, and nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
Density matters as a diagnostic, not a dial. The two failure modes it catches are opposites: a page that never states its target phrase — so neither readers nor search engines can tell what it's supposed to rank for — and a page that repeats the phrase so relentlessly it reads as keyword stuffing, which Google's spam policies explicitly name and which users bounce from. The phrase tables catch subtler problems too: filler words dominating the copy, an accidental pet phrase repeated in every paragraph, or a money page whose top 3-word phrases have nothing to do with its actual topic. Seeing the real frequency data before you publish beats guessing.
This is the manual, one-page version of the content analysis Black & Gold SEO runs across an entire site — checking every page's topical focus, on-page signals and content depth against what actually ranks, then shipping the fixes instead of listing them.
How to use it
- 1
Paste your text
Drop in the full body copy of the page you're checking — a draft, a published article, or a competitor's page you want to reverse-engineer. Leave out navigation, footers and boilerplate so the numbers reflect the real content. Analysis updates instantly on every keystroke; nothing is submitted anywhere.
- 2
Set your target keyword (optional)
Type the exact phrase the page is meant to rank for. The highlight tile shows its occurrence count, density percentage and a verdict: under 0.5% is light, 0.5–2.5% is the range naturally written copy usually lands in, and over 2.5% is keyword-stuffing territory.
- 3
Read the totals
Word count, unique words, characters and reading time update live. Word count isn't a ranking factor, but comparing yours against the pages that currently rank tells you the depth the query demands — a 400-word page rarely outranks 2,000-word competitors on a topic searchers research in depth.
- 4
Scan the three phrase tables
Switch between single words, 2-word and 3-word phrases. Stop words (the, and, of…) are excluded from the single-word table by default so real topic words surface — toggle them back on for raw frequency. The 2- and 3-word tables are the fastest way to see what your page is actually about: your target phrase and close variants should sit near the top.
- 5
Export the data as CSV
Copy or download all three tables as one CSV — table, rank, phrase, count and density — ready for a spreadsheet, a content brief, or a note to your writer about which phrases to prune and which entities are missing.
- 6
Revise and re-check
Edit the text directly in the box and watch the density move. Fixing stuffing usually means replacing repeats with pronouns, synonyms and related entities — which also happens to be how you write copy people actually finish reading.
First, the honest part most keyword density tools won't tell you: density is not a Google ranking factor in 2026, and it hasn't been one for well over a decade. Google's ranking systems read entities, synonyms and topical coverage at the passage level — a page can rank #1 for a phrase it uses twice and get buried for a phrase it uses forty times. There is no magic percentage that makes a page rank. What a keyword density checker still does well is expose the two extremes: a target phrase that never appears (the page never plainly says what it's about) and mechanical repetition that reads as keyword stuffing — a named violation in Google's spam policies and, more practically, the fastest way to make a human hit the back button.
The 0.5–2.5% band this tool labels “natural” isn't a target to optimize toward — it's simply where clearly written copy tends to land when a phrase is used where it belongs: the title, the first paragraph, a heading or two, and wherever a sentence genuinely calls for it. If you're under 0.5%, check that the page states its topic plainly at least once near the top; running light is fine when synonyms and related entities carry the meaning. If you're over 2.5%, read the copy out loud — the fix is almost always swapping repeats for pronouns and variants, not deleting content.
The frequency tables are the underrated half of this tool. Your top 2- and 3-word phrases are a crude but honest map of what the page emphasizes — if you're targeting “standing desk reviews” and your top trigram is “click here to,” the page has a focus problem no density number will show. Use the single-word table (stop words excluded) to spot filler and hedge words worth cutting, and the phrase tables to confirm the entities and subtopics searchers expect — brands, features, use cases, comparisons — actually appear in the copy. Coverage of those is what modern ranking systems reward; the density percentage is just the smoke alarm.
More free SEO tools
SERP Snippet Preview
Preview how your title and meta description appear in Google results, with live pixel-width and character limits.
Meta Tag Generator
Build copy-paste title, description, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags with a live preview.
Schema Markup Generator
Create valid JSON-LD structured data for Organization, LocalBusiness, Article, FAQ, Product and Breadcrumb.
See all free SEO tools or compare Black & Gold SEO vs other platforms.