Keyword density is the share of a text taken up by one word or phrase. If “garden hose” appears ten times in a 500-word article, its density is about 2 percent. SEO guides used to recommend aiming for a particular figure. That advice has aged badly, but the measurement is still useful for one thing in particular: spotting when you have written the same phrase far too often.
Paste your copy and choose one, two or three word phrases. The table shows each phrase with its count and density, starting with the most frequent.
Settings that matter
Phrase length changes what you learn. Single words show your vocabulary. Two-word phrases are usually the most revealing, since that is where “garden hose” or “free shipping” show up. Three-word phrases catch the boilerplate: “terms and conditions”, “click here to”, or a slogan used in every paragraph.
“Skip phrases that start or end with a common word” is on by default. Without it, the list would be dominated by “of the” and “in a”. With it, phrases that begin or end with a filler word are ignored, so “garden hose” survives and “hose of the” does not.
“Show phrases used at least” sets the cut-off, and it is 2 by default, since a phrase that appears once is not telling you anything. For a short text, nothing may reach the cut-off, and the tool will say so; lower it to 1 if you want to see everything.
Density is the phrase count divided by the number of possible phrases of that length in the text, not by the number of words. For single words the two are the same.
What a good number looks like
There is no target. Google has said repeatedly that no ideal keyword density exists, and pages that read naturally do better than pages that were written to hit a figure. A more useful rule: if you read the page aloud and the phrase sounds repetitive, it is repetitive, whatever the percentage says. Usually that is the case somewhere above 3 percent for a single phrase, but a long guide on one narrow subject may carry a higher number honestly.
The more useful question is whether the page covers the topic. If a page about “garden hoses” never mentions “pressure” or “length” or “fittings”, then adding those words, in context, will help readers more than moving the main phrase from 1.2 to 1.8 percent.
Alongside other checks
For a plain ranking of single words, the word frequency counter has more options. Clear filler out of a list with remove stop words. Meta titles and descriptions have their own length limits, which the character limit checker tests, and the word counter covers overall length.