How exactly is the keyword density calculated?
The keyword density is calculated with the help of the formula:
keyword occurences / total word count x 100
Now, the question is which content exactly is included in the calculation of the word count. Sometimes only full text blocks are included, sometimes product titles and other text elements on the page are counted as well. Because of this, the keyword density of web pages, especially of web shops, is often impossible to calculate exactly. Should the product titles all contain the main keyword, then the keyword density will quickly turn out to be much higher than expected – providing these titles are actually counted. Calculating the keyword density is therefore not an exact science.
How does the keyword density checker work?
The keyword density checker works as follows: You enter the keywords for which you wish to check the keyword density in our tool, one query per line. This means that you can also search for keywords that in fact consist of several words, as long as you separate them with an Enter. If you check the Case sensitive option, then only those keywords with the right capitalisation will be counted. If you tick the Search for exact words option, only results that are not part of a compound word are shown.
Why search for exact words?
Search engine users often misspell their search queries, which may result in a higher search volume for a misspelled word than for the correctly spelled version of the word. Although opinions are divided on this, some SEO specialists are convinced that it is best to stick to the spelling that is most commonly used by search engine users. If this is also your approach, you could use our keyword density checker to see how often certain misspellings or correctly spelled keywords appear in your content. It could be that a web page with a misspelled keyword ranks higher among search engine users who also search specifically on that spelling.
The keyword density checker for SEO purposes
Our keyword density checker is primarily suited for SEO purposes. However, we must point out that there exists a lot of confusion about the rules concerning keyword density in SEO texts, and that these rules are constantly changing.
In the past, it was thought that every keyword you wanted to rank for had to have a keyword density of 1 to 4%. This meant that if you have a text of 1000 words, your main keyword should appear 10 to 40 times. However, we can state with certainty that this should not be done at the expense of the readability of your text. Although you do need a certain keyword density, it is essential to avoid keyword stuffing and very unnatural-looking content. Therefore, we’d suggest to mainly use this tool as an indication, and instead focus on creating strong content that offers added value.
Would you rather call in the help of a SEO professional? Our SEO consultants and content specialists are always happy to help! Request a free, no-obligation audit to find out more about the possibilities.
The keyword density checker as a word counter
Apart from SEO purposes, you can also simply use our keyword density checker to count how often a certain word or phrase occurs in a text. This can be useful if you want to buy a translation for which you pay per word, but where e.g. private/company names are not included in the total price. Say we’d do this ourselves, then we could enter a text in the keyword density checker, check how many words it contains in total and then subtract the number of times ‘AdResults’ appears in the text from that number. This way, only the word count for which you actually have to pay remains.
