Keyword density checker for phrases, not just words

There isn't one, and any figure you have been given — three per cent, two per cent, one to two per cent — was invented by a tool vendor rather than a search engine. What is true is descriptive: pages written normally about a subject tend to land somewhere between about half a per cent and two and a half per cent for their main phrase, simply because that is what writing naturally produces. Use that as a sanity check on a draft, never as a target to hit, and if a page falls outside it, read the page rather than adjusting the count.

No. Google has said publicly and repeatedly for well over a decade that there is no ideal density and that repeating a term past the point of natural use does nothing. The underlying maths explains why: relevance scoring saturates term frequency, so the second mention of a word adds real signal, the fifth adds a little, and the twentieth adds essentially nothing. What is still a ranking factor, in the negative direction, is stuffing — and that gets judged by whether the page reads like it was written for a person.

Divide the number of words your phrase occupies by the total words on the page, then multiply by a hundred. The part people get wrong is the numerator: a two-word phrase used five times occupies ten words, not five, so in a 1,000-word page that is 1.0 per cent rather than 0.5. This page uses that convention throughout, which is why a three-word phrase can show a higher density than a single word that appears more often.

Repetition that a reader would notice as unnatural — the same phrase forced into consecutive sentences, lists of city names, or a paragraph at the foot of the page made of variations nobody would say aloud. It is not defined by a percentage, and it never has been; search engines describe it in terms of intent and reader experience. The practical test is to read the paragraph out loud to someone else. If you would be embarrassed, that is stuffing, whatever the number above says.

It usually will if the page is genuinely about that subject, which is the point of the counter next to your target phrase. Nobody has to force it: an opening paragraph that answers the question a searcher asked will contain the words they asked it in. Treat a zero in that box as a prompt to check whether your introduction is actually about the topic, not as a slot to fill — and remember the opening also has to work as the answer someone reads in a search result.

Only what you paste. Titles, meta descriptions and alt attributes live outside the body copy and are usually best checked separately, since they have their own length limits and their own conventions. If you want them in the count, paste them in with the body text — but be aware that adding a 60-character title to a 300-word page nudges every percentage on this screen, which is a reminder of how sensitive density is to what you decide to include.

They are not counted as your keyword, and that is deliberate — this page counts words, not meanings. Modern search engines do handle synonymy and related concepts, so a page about laptops does not need the word laptop wedged in twenty times to be understood as being about laptops. Use the two- and three-word tables to see which related phrases your copy already emphasises; the phrases you find there are often better guides to what the page is really about than the one you typed in the target box.