Measure keyword density in your content.
Keyword density is the share of a page's words taken up by a target keyword. The subtlety is that multi-word phrases contribute all of their words: three uses of a two-word phrase in a 300-word article is six keyword words, or 2 percent, not 1 percent. This tool tokenises your text, scans for non-overlapping occurrences of the full phrase in order, and divides the words consumed by the total. Modern search engines do not reward hitting a specific number — they parse meaning and synonyms — but density is still a useful stuffing check. Anything much above about 3 percent usually reads badly to humans, and reading badly is the actual ranking problem.
Keyword density
Density % = (occurrences x words in the phrase) / total words x 100
Occurrence budget
Max uses = floor(guideline % x total words / words in the phrase)
There is no target that search engines reward directly. Between roughly 0.5 and 2.5 percent is where natural writing usually lands for a genuine topic match. Treat a figure above 3 percent as a prompt to reread the copy aloud — if the repetition is audible, it needs cutting.
Because density counts words, not matches. A two-word phrase used five times occupies ten words. Comparing the density of a one-word keyword against a three-word phrase is not meaningful; compare each against its own history instead.
Only as a diagnostic. Search engines moved to semantic matching years ago and reward covering a topic thoroughly with natural language, synonyms and related entities. Density remains worth checking because a very high number reliably indicates stuffing, which does still hurt.