Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific keyword appears in your text compared to the total number of words. It is calculated as: (number of keyword occurrences ÷ total word count) × 100. For example, if your keyword appears 15 times in a 1,000-word article, its keyword density is 1.5%.

The ideal keyword density for SEO is between 0.5% and 2% for your primary keyword. Below 0.5% and Google may not understand your page’s topic. Above 3% risks being flagged as keyword stuffing. Modern SEO focuses more on natural language, topic coverage, and semantic relevance rather than hitting an exact density number.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of unnaturally repeating a keyword many times in your content to try to rank higher. Google’s algorithm detects this and penalises pages that do it — either by lowering their rankings or removing them from search results entirely. It also creates a poor experience for readers. Always write naturally and use synonyms and related terms instead of repeating the same keyword.

Two-word and three-word phrases (bigrams and trigrams) represent long-tail keywords — more specific search queries that often have higher conversion rates and less competition. Analysing their density helps you identify opportunities to optimise for long-tail terms and ensures you are naturally covering related phrases that searchers use.

Stop words are very common words like “the”, “a”, “and”, “is”, “in”, “of” that carry little meaning on their own. For keyword density analysis, filtering them out helps you focus on the meaningful terms in your content. This tool excludes stop words by default, but you can untick the option in Analysis Options above to include them if needed.