Keyword Density: A Useful Diagnostic, Not a Ranking Lever
Keyword density — the percentage a term occupies of your total word count — was once a favoured way to game search rankings. Modern Google ignores raw frequency and looks for topical coherence, entities, and how naturally a topic is covered. So why look at density at all? Because it’s an excellent diagnostic: a quick way to see what a page is actually about, and a fast way to flag accidental keyword stuffing.
What healthy density looks like
For most editorial content the primary keyword should appear at 0.5–1.5% density — roughly one mention every 100–200 words. Bigrams and trigrams (two- and three-word phrases) are usually more revealing than single words: a page about “machine learning” should have “machine learning” as a top bigram, not just “learning” or “machine” in isolation.
Stopwords change everything
Without filtering stopwords (“the, of, and”), every page looks like it’s about “the”. We exclude them by default. Toggle them back on if you’re analysing for plagiarism or style.
How to use this tool
Paste a draft to see what your editor weights. Or fetch a competitor’s URL to learn which phrases they’re emphasising — then write better and more naturally. Aim for the top trigrams to actually describe the topic in plain English; if they don’t, your content is probably unfocused.