What is a good keyword density percentage for SEO?

There is no official Google figure, but Yoast SEO recommends keeping your focus keyphrase between 0.5% and 3% of total words. Below 0.5% the phrase may be too sparse to signal your topic; above 3% it starts to look like keyword stuffing. This tool grades your keyphrase against that band.

How do you calculate keyword density?

Keyword density = (number of times the keyword appears ÷ total words in the text) × 100. For example, a phrase used 4 times in a 200-word article has a density of 4 ÷ 200 × 100 = 2%. This tool counts the exact phrase and divides by the full word count, the same formula Yoast documents.

What keyword density is considered keyword stuffing?

Google's spam policy defines keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords to manipulate rankings, without giving a numeric cutoff. As a practical guide, densities above roughly 3% for a single phrase often read as unnatural. This tool flags anything over 3% as a stuffing risk so you can trim before publishing.

How many times should a keyword appear in a 1000-word article?

At the 0.5%–3% healthy band, a 1000-word article supports roughly 5 to 30 mentions of one focus keyphrase. Aim for the lower-to-middle of that range and write naturally — exact-match repetition matters far less than covering the topic well. The tool shows the mention range for your specific word count.

Does keyword density still matter for Google rankings in 2026?

Google does not use a fixed keyword-density target, and modern ranking relies on relevance, intent, and content quality. Density is still useful as a sanity check: it confirms your topic is clearly present and warns you off accidental over-repetition that can trigger spam signals. Treat it as a guardrail, not a target to hit.

Does this tool send my content to a server?

No. All counting runs in your browser with JavaScript — there is no upload, no API call, and nothing is logged or stored. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works. That makes it safe for unpublished drafts and client work under NDA.

Why does the density use the full word count, including common words?

Because that is how the figure a search engine sees is framed. Turning on "ignore common words" hides stop words like "the" and "of" from the table for readability, but they still count toward total words. Keeping the denominator constant means your density percentages stay comparable whether or not you hide stop words.

Can it check 2-word and 3-word phrases, not just single words?

Yes. The phrase-length control switches the density table between 1-word, 2-word, and 3-word sequences. Most real focus keyphrases are two or three words ("fixed deposit", "car import tax"), so the multi-word view usually matters more than single words for SEO.

SEO · Text

Keyword Density Checker

Paste any article and instantly see how often every word and phrase appears, with its keyword density as a percentage. Catch over-used terms that risk Google's keyword-stuffing penalty and check that your focus keyphrase sits in the healthy 0.5%–3% range. Runs entirely in your browser — no upload, no signup.

By Induwara Ashinsana— Executive Director, Ryzera TechnologiesUpdated Jun 24, 2026

Keyword density analysis

Your content

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored.

Focus keyphrase (optional)

The exact phrase you want to rank for. We count it and grade its density.

Minimum count to show

Hide terms that appear fewer than this many times.

Total words

Unique words

Sentences

Characters

0 without spaces

Reading time

0 min

at 200 wpm

Density table

Phrase length

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Paste content above (or load a sample) to see word and phrase frequency, keyword density, and stuffing warnings.

Method: raw term frequency (Manning et al., 2008). Keyphrase-density formula and the 0.5%–3% healthy band from Yoast SEO; stuffing warning from Google Search Central.

How it works

Keyword density measures how often a term appears relative to the total number of words on a page. The counting model is raw term frequency— the literal number of times a token occurs — defined in Manning, Raghavan & Schütze's Introduction to Information Retrieval (Cambridge, 2008). The density percentage itself uses the formula documented by Yoast SEO:

density = (keyphrase count ÷ total words) × 100

The tool runs entirely client-side in four deterministic steps:

Normalise.The text is lowercased and every run of non-alphanumeric characters is replaced with a single space, keeping intra-word apostrophes and hyphens so “co-op” and “don't” stay intact.
Tokenise. The normalised text is split on spaces into a word array. Its length is the total words — the denominator for every density figure.
Count. For single words, each unique token is tallied. For 2- and 3-word phrases, a sliding window walks every contiguous sequence and counts exact matches. Density is each count divided by total words.
Grade the focus keyphrase. If you enter one, its exact occurrences are counted and mapped to a band: under 0.5% (under-used), 0.5%–3% (healthy), or above 3% (stuffing risk).

The healthy 0.5%–3% band comes from Yoast's keyphrase-density guidance; the upper warning aligns with Google Search Central's keyword-stuffing policy, which treats cramming a page with keywords to manipulate rankings as spam. When “ignore common words” is on, stop words (the, a, of, to, and…) are hidden from the table, but they are never removed from the total-word denominator — so densities stay comparable to what a search engine actually measures.

For credibility the focus keyphrase is counted two independent ways: a sliding token window and a separate text scan. If the two ever disagree, the tool shows a warning instead of a silent number — the same dual-method check the site's tax calculator uses against the IRD formula.

Worked examples

Example 1 — phrase stuffing

Text: "Sri Lanka travel guide. Sri Lanka is beautiful. Visit Sri Lanka."

Tokenise → [sri, lanka, travel, guide, sri, lanka, is, beautiful, visit, sri, lanka]
Total words = 11
"sri": 3 ÷ 11 × 100 = 27.27%
Bigram "sri lanka": 3 ÷ 11 × 100 = 27.27%
Focus "sri lanka" → 27.27% ≫ 3% → STUFFING RISK

Example 2 — healthy focus keyphrase

200-word article, focus keyphrase "fixed deposit" used 4 times.

Density = 4 ÷ 200 × 100 = 2.00%
0.5% ≤ 2.00% ≤ 3% → HEALTHY
Add 3 more mentions (7 total): 7 ÷ 200 × 100 = 3.50%
3.50% > 3% → verdict flips to STUFFING RISK → trim back

Example 3 — the 3% boundary (edge case)

1000-word article — exactly where the verdict tips over.

30 mentions: 30 ÷ 1000 × 100 = 3.00% → HEALTHY (band is inclusive)
31 mentions: 31 ÷ 1000 × 100 = 3.10% → STUFFING RISK
So the safe ceiling for one phrase here is 30 mentions.

Frequently asked questions

Sources & references

The keyphrase-density formula and the healthy 0.5%–3% band on this page were last reconciled against the Yoast and Google Search Central sources on 2026-06-24.

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