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What keyword density actually means
Keyword density is the percentage of times a word appears relative to the total word count. A 500-word page with “running shoes” appearing 10 times has a 2% density for that phrase.
The formula is simple: (occurrences ÷ total words) × 100. What matters is knowing what the number means in practice.
- 0.5–2% is a healthy range. The term appears enough to signal topic relevance without standing out as deliberate repetition to a reader or a crawler.
- 2–3.5% is moderate. Not automatically a problem, but read the content aloud. If the repetition sounds odd, it probably reads oddly to Google too.
- Above 3.5% tends to read as stuffed. Google has penalised keyword stuffing since the Panda updates. More importantly, it degrades readability, which hurts bounce rate and time-on-page.
How to use the phrase view
Switch to 2-word or 3-word phrases to see which specific combinations dominate. This is often more useful than single-word counts because it tells you which topics the content covers, not just which words it uses frequently.
A page ranking for “best running shoes” should show that exact phrase in the 3-word view with a density between 0.5% and 2%. If it appears once in 1000 words (0.1%), the page may not signal the topic strongly enough. If it appears 20 times (2%), it may read as over-optimised.
Stop words
Stop words are common function words — “the”, “and”, “is”, “in” — that appear on every page regardless of topic. Filtering them surfaces the words that actually carry meaning.
Turn filtering off when you are looking at raw text stats or when you need to check that function words are not inflating your counts. Turn it on when you are auditing keyword strategy.
Common mistakes
Optimising for density instead of relevance
Keyword density is a proxy metric, not a ranking factor. Google does not have a target density it rewards. Write for the reader, check that your primary topic appears naturally throughout, and use this tool to catch accidental over-repetition rather than to hit a number.
Ignoring synonyms and related terms
A page about “running shoes” that never uses “trainers”, “sneakers”, or “footwear” is less topically rich than one that does. Google uses semantic understanding, not just keyword matching. Use the phrase view to check whether your content covers the topic broadly or repeats the same term in isolation.
Analysing the wrong content
Paste the body copy only, not the full HTML. Navigation menus, footers, and sidebar text inflate word counts and dilute density readings. What matters is what a reader — and Google’s content classifier — would consider the main content of the page.
Related tools
- SERP simulator — once your top terms are right, see how they look in a Google snippet.
- Robots.txt validator — confirm Google can actually reach the page you are optimising.
Full SEO audit
Keyword density is one lens. The full CrawlRanker scan checks meta tags, heading structure, page speed, schema, broken links, image alt, and an AI-content score — from a live URL in about 30 seconds, no signup.