Keyword density is the percentage of times a target keyword appears in your content relative to total words. To calculate manually: count keyword occurrences, divide by total word count, multiply by 100. If your keyword appears 8 times in a 1,000-word article, that's 0.8% density. Most practitioners don't calculate this by hand anymore. Tools handle it automatically: - Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin) shows density in real-time as you write - Surfer SEO analyzes density against top-ranking competitors - Free options like SEOReviewTools, SmallSEOTools, or WebFX's keyword density checker accept URL or pasted text - Screaming Frog can crawl pages and export keyword frequency data in bulk For manual checking without tools, paste your content into Google Docs or Word, use Find (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to count keyword instances, then divide by word count from the status bar. The bigger question is whether density still matters. It doesn't, at least not as a target metric. Google's algorithms moved past simple keyword frequency over a decade ago. Chasing 2% or 3% density leads to awkward, repetitive writing that hurts user experience and can trigger over-optimization penalties. What actually matters is natural usage and semantic relevance. Your target keyword should appear in the title, early in the content, and in a few subheadings where it makes sense. Beyond that, focus on related terms, synonyms, and answering the user's intent thoroughly. When we audit pages at Ottawa SEO, we check whether keywords appear in strategic locations, not whether they hit some magic percentage. If you're using a tool that flags low density, ignore it unless the keyword is genuinely absent from important areas. If it flags high density above 2-3%, rewrite to sound more natural. Read your content aloud—if the keyword repetition feels forced, it probably is. Search engines and users both prefer content written for humans first, with keywords integrated where they fit organically, not stuffed to hit arbitrary thresholds.