Where do your keywords appear?

What this report counts

One page, one fetch. The analyzer reads the page's text by structural slot: the title, the meta description, the URL slug, the H1, the H2 and H3 headings, the opening paragraphs, image alt text and link text. Then it counts the single words, two-word and three-word phrases the page uses most, and shows which of the eight slots each one appears in.

Navigation, header, footer, sidebars, forms and scripts are excluded before counting, so a phrase that sits in the menu of every page does not count as the subject of this one. The order of the list is our own ranking, labelled as such; the counts and placements are facts about the page.

Why there is no density score

Keyword density tools hand out a target percentage. Google's spam policies describe where that target leads: "Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in Google Search results." The SEO starter guide says the same from the reader's side: "Excessively repeating the same words over and over (even in variations) is tiring for users, and keyword stuffing is against Google's spam policies."

So the analyzer reports repetition as a warning and never as a goal, and it gives no per-slot weights either. Google does not publish how much a heading counts against body text, and a multiplier we invented would be precision with nothing behind it.

What placement tells you

Placement is the useful part. Google builds the headline of a search result from the page: "There are a few sources that Google uses to generate this title link, including the words inside the <title> element (also called the title text) and other headings on the page." Its title link documentation adds: "Consider ensuring that your main heading is distinctive from other text on a page and stands out as being the most prominent on the page". Headings matter for readers too: "Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages."

Read the slots with that in mind. A phrase that sits in the title, the H1, the URL and the opening paragraph is the page's subject as a search engine sees it. A phrase that appears forty times in the body and in none of those four slots is a mismatch: either the page is about something its title does not say, or the repetition is padding.

How to read a report

• Check that the top phrase is the one the page exists for. If it is not, the title, the H1 and the intro need work before anything else.
• Look for a second strong phrase with slots of its own. Two subjects on one page compete with each other, and with any page you already have on the second subject; keyword cannibalization is the name for the result.
• Read the alt and link columns. Image alt text and link text are the two slots people forget; "click here" carries nothing, and descriptive anchor text does.
• Ignore high counts for words that are the topic's own vocabulary. A page about invoices will say "invoice" often. That is not stuffing, and the tool will not tell you it is.

What it will not do

No search volumes, no difficulty scores, no competitor pages and no verdict. Plurals are folded into the singular only on English pages, and only when the singular also appears, so two different words are never merged. Other languages are counted as written.

Questions people ask

• Why is a word from my menu still in the list? The menu is excluded when it is marked up as navigation. A menu built from plain links in a div counts as body text; the fix belongs in the HTML.
• Does it read pages built by JavaScript? It reads the HTML the server sends. Content added by scripts after load is not counted.
• What is a good number? There is none; read the placements instead.
• Is it free? Yes. No sign-up and no email.

Read more

• How to find topics worth ranking for: choosing the phrase before writing the page.
• Keyword cannibalization: when two of your pages fight over one query.
• How to read Google Search Console: the queries a page already gets impressions for.