What keyword and phrase density actually shows
Density is the percentage of your total word count made up of a particular word or phrase. This tool breaks your pasted article into 1-word, 2-word, and 3-word phrases and shows how often each one repeats throughout the text, plus a specific density figure if you enter one target keyword to track directly. It's a useful sanity check against obvious, accidental over-repetition - not a target percentage to engineer your way toward.
Why checking all three phrase lengths together matters
A single repeated word might just be a common, necessary term for the topic (like "content" on a page about content marketing), while a repeated two- or three-word phrase is a stronger, more specific signal of what the piece is actually about. Looking at all three lengths side by side gives a fuller picture of which terms are genuinely central to the article versus which are simply common words that happen to recur.
Why filtering common words changes the picture
Words like "the," "and," and "a" naturally appear more often than any topic-specific word in virtually any piece of writing, but they carry no SEO meaning at all. Filtering them out (the default behavior here) surfaces the meaningful, topic-relevant repeated words and phrases instead of burying them under function-word noise.
Why you can track more than one target keyword at once
Most pages are written around a primary keyword plus a few secondary or related phrases, not a single term in isolation - so the target keyword field accepts one phrase per line and shows the count and density for each. That makes it possible to check, in one pass, whether a primary keyword and its secondary variants are all represented at a reasonable level, rather than re-running the check once per phrase.
Why there's no "correct" density to hit
Older SEO advice from years ago suggested specific density targets, often in the 1-3% range, as something to engineer toward. Modern search engines evaluate topical relevance, comprehensiveness, and natural language quality far more than any fixed keyword ratio - this tool is best used to catch unintentional over-repetition that might read as awkward or spammy to an actual reader, not to hit a specific percentage.