What keyword density is safe?

Keep any single meaningful word under about 2.5% of the text, and your primary keyword between 0.5% and 1.5%. This tool flags anything above 3%, the point where repetition starts to read as stuffing to both people and spam classifiers. These are sanity bounds, not targets — there is no density that improves rankings.

Is keyword density a Google ranking factor?

No. Google’s search advocates have said for years that there is no ideal keyword density, and modern retrieval scores relevance with term-saturation curves and semantic matching, not raw counts. Density checks are useful in the other direction: they catch the over-repetition that can trip spam policies and, more often, simply reads badly.

How do I calculate keyword density?

Divide the number of times the keyword appears by the total number of words, then multiply by 100. Twelve uses in an 800-word article is 12 ÷ 800 × 100 = 1.5%. For multi-word phrases the denominator is the number of possible phrase positions, which is why a two-word phrase can never reach 100% in a text of ten words.

How many times should I use my main keyword in a 1,000-word article?

Five to fifteen times — 0.5% to 1.5% — is plenty, with one use in the title, one in the first hundred words, one in a subheading, and the rest occurring naturally. If you have to hunt for places to insert it, stop; variants and synonyms carry the same topical signal without the repetition.

What counts as keyword stuffing?

Repetition with no value to the reader: the same phrase in every paragraph, lists of near-identical city-plus-service variations, blocks of keywords in footers, or text where a single word exceeds roughly 3% of everything on the page. Google’s spam policies name keyword stuffing explicitly, and the usual outcome is not a penalty but quiet irrelevance — the page reads badly, earns nothing, and ranks accordingly.

Why check two- and three-word phrases, not just single words?

Because searches are phrases. Nobody queries “density” — they query “keyword density checker”, a three-word phrase. The bigram and trigram tables show whether your draft actually contains the phrases people type, which single-word counts hide completely: a page can mention “keyword” forty times and never once say the phrase it wants to rank for.

Keyword Density Checker

See the 1-, 2- and 3-word phrases your draft emphasizes — and catch stuffing.

Your text

Ignore common words(“the”, “and”, “of”…)

Total words 0

Paste your draft to see which words and phrases it leans on — single words, two-word phrases, and three-word phrases, each with count and density.

What keyword density is

Keyword density is the share of a text that one word or phrase occupies: occurrences divided by total words, times 100. Use “email marketing” 12 times in an 800-word draft and its density is 1.5%. The arithmetic is trivial; the value is in seeing it computed across every word and phrase at once. A draft always emphasizes something — this tool shows you what, in three tables: single words, two-word phrases, and three-word phrases, each with its count and density.

One honest detail about the math here: percentages are always calculated against all words in the text, including “the”, “and”, and their relatives. The “ignore common words” toggle only hides rows made entirely of those function words so the tables show substance instead of grammar — it does not change any percentage. And for phrases, the denominator is the number of possible phrase positions in the text, which is the standard way n-gram frequency is measured.

The 0.5–2.5% guidance — and what it actually means

The working range most experienced editors use: a primary keyword around 0.5–1.5%, and no single meaningful word above 2.5%. This tool warns at 3%. It matters to understand what these numbers are not. They are not a dial that tunes rankings — Google’s search advocates have said for years that there is no ideal keyword density, and no density that earns a boost. The range is a sanity band with two failure modes at its edges. Below roughly 0.5%, check whether the page actually says what it is about: it is surprisingly common to write 1,200 words “about” a query without ever using its words, and while modern search understands synonyms, clarity still helps both readers and machines. Above 2.5–3%, the repetition becomes audible. Readers notice it before algorithms do.

Why stuffing fails

Keyword stuffing is a fossil tactic from the era when search engines ranked pages substantially on term frequency. Two things killed it. First, ranking functions in the BM25 family apply term-frequency saturation: the contribution of a repeated term flattens out fast, so the tenth occurrence adds almost nothing beyond the third. Repetition past a handful of uses buys literally nothing, even in purely mechanical terms. Second, Google’s spam policies name keyword stuffing explicitly, and repetition patterns are one of the easiest spam signals to detect. The practical consequence is rarely a dramatic penalty — it is a page that reads like it was written for a machine, earns no links, no citations, and no second visit, and settles into the obscurity it deserves.

Why one, two, and three-word phrases

The three tables answer three different questions. Single words show topical vocabulary — the nouns and verbs your draft leans on. Two-word phrases start to look like subjects: “content calendar”, “meta description”. Three-word phrases look like queries, because they are how people search: “keyword density checker”, “how to write”. The phrase tables are usually more revealing than the single-word one. A draft targeting “keyword density checker” can use all three words heavily and still never contain the phrase itself — a gap the unigram view cannot show, and exactly the kind of thing worth fixing in a title, an H2, or an opening paragraph.

How to use it well

Paste the finished draft — not an outline. Density on 100 words is noise; a few hundred words make the percentages meaningful.
Read the two- and three-word tables first and check one thing: is the phrase you want to rank for present, and is it near the top?
Confirm the primary phrase sits somewhere around 0.5–1.5%, with at least one use in the title and one in a subheading.
Look for what is missing: variants and synonyms a searcher would use that never appear. The fix is usually one sentence, not a rewrite.
If a word draws a warning, rewrite the sentences around it — vary the phrasing, use pronouns, restructure. Mechanical deletion to hit a number produces the same stilted prose as mechanical insertion.

What good looks like

In a healthy 1,500-word article: the primary phrase among the top three bigrams or trigrams at 0.5–1.5% (roughly 8–20 uses), a cluster of related terms filling the rest of the top ten, and no single meaningful word above 2.5%. The single-word table should read like a table of contents for the topic. If the top five entries are all variations of one word, the draft is circling; if the target phrase is absent from all three tables, the draft is about something other than what you think it is.

When density misleads you

Density measures repetition, and repetition is a weak proxy for relevance. Modern search engines and AI answer engines match meaning — synonyms, entities, and context carry topical signal that never shows up in these tables, so a page can be perfectly optimized at 0.9% density and still miss the intent of the query entirely. Short texts produce wild percentages: one use in 50 words is already 2%, so ignore the warnings until a draft has a few hundred words. Different tools also disagree — some strip stopwords from the denominator, some count stemmed variants (“checker” and “checkers”) as one term; this tool does neither, so its numbers will not match every other checker to the decimal. Treat density as a smoke alarm for over-repetition and a mirror for emphasis. Whether the page deserves to rank is decided by coverage, accuracy, and whether anyone wants to cite it — none of which a percentage can see.

Frequently asked questions

What keyword density is safe?: Keep any single meaningful word under about 2.5% of the text, and your primary keyword between 0.5% and 1.5%. This tool flags anything above 3%, the point where repetition starts to read as stuffing to both people and spam classifiers. These are sanity bounds, not targets — there is no density that improves rankings.
Is keyword density a Google ranking factor?: No. Google’s search advocates have said for years that there is no ideal keyword density, and modern retrieval scores relevance with term-saturation curves and semantic matching, not raw counts. Density checks are useful in the other direction: they catch the over-repetition that can trip spam policies and, more often, simply reads badly.
How do I calculate keyword density?: Divide the number of times the keyword appears by the total number of words, then multiply by 100. Twelve uses in an 800-word article is 12 ÷ 800 × 100 = 1.5%. For multi-word phrases the denominator is the number of possible phrase positions, which is why a two-word phrase can never reach 100% in a text of ten words.
How many times should I use my main keyword in a 1,000-word article?: Five to fifteen times — 0.5% to 1.5% — is plenty, with one use in the title, one in the first hundred words, one in a subheading, and the rest occurring naturally. If you have to hunt for places to insert it, stop; variants and synonyms carry the same topical signal without the repetition.
What counts as keyword stuffing?: Repetition with no value to the reader: the same phrase in every paragraph, lists of near-identical city-plus-service variations, blocks of keywords in footers, or text where a single word exceeds roughly 3% of everything on the page. Google’s spam policies name keyword stuffing explicitly, and the usual outcome is not a penalty but quiet irrelevance — the page reads badly, earns nothing, and ranks accordingly.
Why check two- and three-word phrases, not just single words?: Because searches are phrases. Nobody queries “density” — they query “keyword density checker”, a three-word phrase. The bigram and trigram tables show whether your draft actually contains the phrases people type, which single-word counts hide completely: a page can mention “keyword” forty times and never once say the phrase it wants to rank for.

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The Pre-Publish Checklist

Density is one signal. The checklist covers the other 46. 47 checks WriteZu runs before an article ships — as a checklist you can run by hand.

No spam. The checklist, then only what's worth knowing.

Readability CheckerFlesch reading ease, grade level, and the exact sentences that drag you down.SERP PreviewPixel-accurate preview of your title and description in Google results.Word CounterWords, characters, sentences, reading time and speaking time — as you type.

WriteZu does this automatically — for every article

It reads your site, maps the topics you can win, writes the calendar, and publishes articles that pass every check on this page — scored and revised before you ever see them.

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