How to check keyword density in your content
Keyword density is how often a phrase appears relative to the total number of words on the page. Paste your copy and a target phrase above and you get the percentage, the word count and the number of occurrences. It is a useful sanity check and a terrible target.
It is worth being clear about why. Search engines stopped ranking on density a long time ago; they read topic and intent. What density still catches is the two failures you can see from the outside — a page that never mentions the thing it is supposed to be about, and a page that mentions it so often no human would finish reading.
How keyword density is calculated
Density = (occurrences × words in the phrase ÷ total words) × 100. Multiplying by the length of the phrase matters: five uses of a three-word phrase occupies fifteen words, and counting it as five would understate it threefold.
Count body copy only. Navigation, footers and sidebars repeat on every page, and including them makes a thin page look well optimised while telling you nothing about the part that ranks.
A 900-word page using "google ads agency" six times:
(6 × 3 ÷ 900) × 100 = 2% density. Comfortably inside a natural range — noticeable to a search engine, invisible to a reader.
What is a good keyword density?
Between roughly 0.5% and 2.5% is where natural writing tends to land without anyone aiming for it. That is the point: if you have to work to hit a density figure, the writing has already gone wrong.
- Under 0.5% — the page may not be clearly about the thing it is meant to rank for.
- 0.5% to 2.5% — a natural range. Nothing to fix.
- Above 3% — reads as repetitive to a person well before it reads as spam to a crawler.
- Zero — worth a look. Sometimes deliberate, often an oversight.
Placement beats frequency
Where a phrase appears carries far more weight than how often. One use in the H1 and the opening sentence does more than six scattered through the body, because it tells both the reader and the crawler what the page is about before either commits.
| Placement | Weight | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Title and H1 | Highest | Once, naturally phrased |
| First paragraph and H2s | High | Confirms the topic early |
| Body copy | Moderate | Variations count too |
Write for the topic, not the percentage
The practical approach is to cover the subject properly and check density afterwards. Use the words people actually search, answer the related questions they ask next, and let synonyms and variations do their work — search engines have understood those for years.
If a page is genuinely not ranking, density is rarely the reason. Intent mismatch, thin coverage and a page that loads slowly on a phone account for most of it. That is the order worth checking in, and it is the same order a landing page review would work through.