Our free software helps you understand how machines and humans might interpret your text, which can help you improve your writing for SEO. By mining the text for data on readability, word count and frequency, and keyword density, you can understand how a search engine may see your text.

Word count and frequency checker

Make sure you’re hitting your targets when writing, with an accurate analysis of the word count you’re using. Explore our keyword density reports to analyze the frequency of keyword usage, and tweak your content to ensure it is highly readable and your content is not over-optimized for specific terms.

How is the word count calculated by this tool?

We strip all punctuation, from periods and colons through to hyphens and commas. Once this is done, we remove all the excess spaces and then count the gaps between the words. This gives us an accurate count of the words, letters and other characters in your text.

How many words is the average sentence?

On average we expect a sentence to contain 20 words. But average writing is boring. Good writing should vary in pace and length, to keep the reader engaged and hold their attention for longer. This is especially important online, where people tend to skim read.

When is a sentence too long?

Sometimes long sentences are neccessary. But it can make it hard for your reader to digest if you cram too many words into one sentance, as we are deliberately doing here - as it gets longer the reading difficulty increases and you might find you..

So we suggest keeping your sentences shorter if you can. You want your writing to be enjoyable, so don’t overcomplicate things. Just use fewer words.

What’s the ideal word count for a blog post?

There’s really no set answer for the ideal length of the perfect blog post. Your article should try and cover a topic in sufficient depth to keep it interesting and informative for readers. Depending on the topic this may be as little as 300 or 500 words, or it may required a longer essay, such as 1,000, 2,000 or even 5,000 words.

Unless you’re being paid by the word, you should really be aiming to write clearly and succinctly. There’s no point us writing 1,000 words on the perfect word count, and you wouldn’t enjoy it either. But if we were to talk about how to write for SEO we could probably manage 10,000 words and still have things to say.

Keyword Density Analysis Tool

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is a measure of how frequently a keyword or phrase (for example, ‘cheap sofas’) occurs in a page. It used to be used by SEOs to determine how well ‘optimized’ their content was. At one point search engines were fairly simple machines, and you could appear higher by simply repeating your main keyword more often than the competition.

This doesn’t work anymore.

How is keyword density calculated?

Calculating keyword density uses a really simple formula. All you need to do is count the number of times a keyword or phrase appears in the text, and divide by the total number of words on the page. For example, if I mention ‘keyword’ 100 times in this article, and my article is 1,000 times long, my keyword density would be 10%. And my article would be practically unreadable!

So what is a perfect keyword density when writing online?

There is no ideal keyword density, no magic number that will make you rank higher in Google. Occasionally people give a figure of 1-2%, which is not unreasonable - and certainly anything over 2% might be deemed a little spammy. But this defeats the point.

Search engines have been part of our life for decades, and they have some of the smartest people in the world working for them. Their approach to understand your article is so far beyond counting words on a page.

Instead of whipping out a calculator and measuring tape, they now use advanced machine learning techniques. The field of natural language understanding has come on so far that it is now simple for a computer to extract the meaning of an article using AI. This means rather than counting word frequency, they seek to analyze whether your article answers the question a searcher is asking.

Using a keyword density analysis tool to optimize your content

Using keyword density is a fairly outdated approach to optimizing your content for SEO - in most cases you will want to be writing your text for humans rather than obsession over the precise frequency of keyword usage. It is unlikely you can find an ‘ideal’ keyword density to rank your pages for your target keywords, as Google’s relevance measures have advanced so much in recent years.

That said, we still feel analyzing keyword density has some value in avoiding over-use of specific terms and phrases in your text. By avoiding ‘keyword stuffing’ or over-use of specific phrases you can ensure you don’t trip any algorithmic filters or penalties.

You got me. It’s a trap!

I really want to help people succeed online with SEO, and understand how to correctly optimize their website content for better rankings. By creating a tool and article explaining the pros (and many cons!) of keyword density, I can help direct people towards more effective techniques.

Frankly I think we all spend too long behind screens. If I can help someone out there waste less time optimizing their keyword density ratios, and make their SEO strategies more efficient, we can all go home and play sooner.

How to perform an SEO keyword analysis in 2020 using entity and topic analysis

A far better approach is to analyze your content in the context of the search results you are targeting. By mimicing Google’s use of Natural Language Processing, (a kind of artificial intelligence devoted to understanding the wording we use) and considering your use of entities and topics in comparison to your competition’s pages you can develop an understanding of how to make your content more topically relevant.

Google's informational retrieval technology has moved on a long way from simple word frequency analysis and keyword density scores, and its time our SEO strategies did too. Their use of machine learning has dramatically increased their ability to understand natural language. By using the same processes they've developed to extract meaning and knowlege from content, we can draw comparisons and see patterns in the sources they choose to promote in their search results. We can use this knowlege to improve the semantic relevance of our work, and better communicate the subject and context of our text to our customers and search engines alike.

You should cover the same topics and entities in your text as other pages in your niche to ensure your content doesn’t miss any vital information that searchers are looking for. Tools such as SEO Scout use named entity recognition to analyze competing pages and suggest ways in which your own content may be lacking in depth and context.

When you analyze the top results for your keywords, SEO Scout's service will generate a range of insights based on the content found ranking in the top thirty results for your keyword. Using information extracted from the article found in the top position, in combination with natural language understanding algorithms, it is possible to predict which topics and linked entities Google expect to find in your text. Writing in greater depth on these topics within your article is a great technique to improve the overall relevance of your piece, that has helped many SEOs improve their placement in the search engines. It can also dramatically improve the number of long tail keywords your page can rank for



Improve your writing using readability scores

Whether writing for SEO or for the web in general, it’s vital you can get your ideas across in your text clearly. Attention spans are limited, and complex sentences can kill conversions.

We use the Flesh Kinkaid reading ease score to assess your content’s readability. This can be presented as a percentage, where a high score means it is easier to read, or as a grade level. The grade level signifies how many of years of school you would need to read the text. The lower the level, the better for all readers, no matter their level of education!

The score is calculated by looking at factors such as the number of words - or syllables - per sentence. By counting words or syllables per sentence we get a measure of how difficult a text is to read.

To improve your readability score you need to write shorter sentences. You should avoid the use of complex phrases. Shorter, simpler language helps get your point across more easily. The less a reader needs to think, the more likely they are to read your writing. If you need to use longer words, try to keep the sentences short.

Check your readability score and grade level using our free tool

As well as analyzing your keyword density, the word count and other text analytics, we automatically check how easy your content is to read. Simply paste your article in the box above and we’ll check for difficult words and hard to read sentences. Readability scores are calculated using the Flesch Kincaid reading east algorithm, and supplemented with similar metrics such as the SMOG index, Automated Readability Index, Gunning Fog and Coleman Liau scores.

Do you really need all of those? Probably not - any reading ease score should help you understand where your content is getting too complex. But we like to be complete 🙂