Keyword Frequency Counter

What a keyword frequency counter is actually for

A frequency counter reads a block of text and tells you how often each word and phrase appears. That is a small thing to build and almost every free tool on the subject does it the same way: paste some text, pick one, two or three word phrases, tick a box to ignore common words, read a list.

The counting was never the hard part. What is missing from nearly all of them is context. A list of your own most used phrases tells you what you wrote, which you already knew. It does not tell you what you failed to write, and it does not tell you how your draft compares with the page currently beating you. That is the gap this tool is built around.

Compare up to four sources at once

Add a second source and the table gains a column. Every phrase is counted in each source, side by side, with a total. Add a third and a fourth and you can put your draft next to the three pages ranking above it.

Then sort by biggest gap. The table reorders so the phrases where the sources diverge most come first, and a zero in your column is a subject the others cover and you do not. That is a content gap analysis, and it normally lives behind a subscription. Here it is a dropdown.

Sources can be pasted text or a page address, mixed freely. Give it an address and the page is fetched and stripped of navigation, sidebars, cookie banners and footers first, so the counts describe the article rather than the template that surrounds it.

Track the phrases you actually care about

A top fifty list is ordered by what you used most, which means the terms you were trying to use and forgot are precisely the ones missing from it. Paste your target phrases into the tracking box, one per line, and each one is counted exactly as written no matter how rare it is. Anything you never used is marked not used rather than silently left out.

With several sources loaded, the tracked table gets a column each, so you can see at a glance that a rival mentions your target phrase eleven times and you mention it twice.

Sensible defaults, all of them switchable

• One to five word phrases. Most counters stop at three. Real search queries are frequently longer, and a four or five word phrase repeated across several competitors is a strong hint about how people actually ask the question.
• Common words ignored. Single words on the stop list are dropped, and longer phrases are dropped only when they open or close with one, so “best running shoes” survives while “of the best” does not.
• Plurals folded onto singulars. “Shoe” and “shoes” become one row instead of two half-rows. The rule is deliberately shallow: a trailing s, es or ies only, leaving ss, us and is alone. A full stemmer would turn “running” into “run” and “business” into “busi”, which is tidier and much less useful.
• Case ignored. Turn matching on if you are studying capitalisation or proper nouns specifically.
• A minimum count. Set to two by default so one-off words do not bury the pattern. A phrase qualifies if it clears the bar in any source, so a term a competitor leans on is never hidden just because you never used it.

How to read the numbers

There is no ideal keyword frequency and there has not been for many years. Repetition stopped being a ranking signal long ago, and Google has spent the time since getting better at recognising it for what it usually is. If you find yourself trying to hit a number, the tool is being used backwards.

What a count is genuinely good for is noticing things that are invisible while you are writing. That you have used “solution” forty times. That the phrase the page is supposed to be about appears exactly once, in the introduction. That three competitors all discuss sizing and returns and your draft mentions neither. Those are editing decisions, and a frequency table surfaces them faster than rereading ever will.

Which of these tools do I want?

There is deliberate overlap between three of the free tools here, so the short version:

• Use the Keyword Density Checker to audit one published page. It reports density and prominence and, more usefully, whether your term actually reaches the title, the headings, the address and the alt text.
• Use the Word Counter while you are drafting, for live counts, reading time and readability.
• Use this one when the question involves more than one text, a phrase longer than three words, or a specific list of terms you need to confirm.

And once the writing is done, the SERP Snippet Preview Tool and the Meta Description Checker cover how the finished page presents itself in the results, while the Blog Title Analyzer scores the headline.

Is anything stored?

No. Pasted text is counted in your browser and never leaves the page. A source given as an address has to be fetched by our server, because a browser is not permitted to read another site’s pages directly, so that address is sent and the page text comes back. Nothing is written to a database or kept in a log either way, and the report lives only in the open tab. Export the CSV before you close it if you want to keep the numbers.