What this tool does
This SEO word counter is built for the moment before you publish, not for the moment before you submit an essay. It gives you the usual figures — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, estimated reading time — and then three things a generic counter does not: how often your focus keyphrase appears, how dense it is as a percentage, and whether it turns up early enough to tell a reader what the page is about.
All of it is worked out locally while you write. Unpublished drafts and client copy never leave your machine.
How to use it
Paste the draft into the box and, if you have one, type the phrase you are targeting into the focus keyphrase field. The figures update on every keystroke. The keyphrase panel reports occurrences, density, the word position of the first match, and whether that match falls inside the opening 100 words and inside the first paragraph.
Length is a symptom, not a target
Google has been consistent about this for years, and it still surprises people: there is no minimum word count, and length is not a ranking factor. Pages of a few hundred words hold position one for questions that deserve a few hundred words.
What correlates with length in the studies people quote is topic coverage. A query like "robots txt disallow all except one page" needs the recipe, the reason it works, and the two ways it commonly goes wrong — and that happens to take a while to write. The length is the residue of covering the subject, not the cause of the ranking. Writing to a target instead produces the padding everyone recognises on sight.
The 2,000-word rule that circulates in content briefs comes from correlation studies of top results, and it inverts cause and effect. If you find yourself expanding a finished answer to hit a number, you are making the page worse in exchange for a metric nobody scores.
Where length does earn its keep
Three cases justify writing more, and they are all about the reader.
The first is genuine breadth. A comparison, a buyer's guide or a reference table covers more ground because the question is bigger, and a short version simply leaves the reader mid-task.
The second is snippet surface. Featured snippets and the answers assembled by AI results are pulled from passages, so a page that answers several adjacent questions in clearly headed sections has more places to be quoted from than a page that answers one.
The third is intent. A transactional query wants a price and a button. An informational query wants the reasoning. Matching the depth to the intent is the whole exercise, and word count is just the number that falls out afterwards.
Thin content is about value
The phrase "thin content" describes pages with little or no added value, which is a judgement about substance rather than size. Restating what ten other pages already said, at any length, is thin. Answering a narrow question completely in 150 words is not.
The practical test is whether someone who reads your page can now do something they could not do before. If the answer is no, adding paragraphs will not fix it.
Keyphrase density, and why it stopped mattering
Density was a real technique in an era when search engines counted occurrences. Panda ended that in 2011, and every ranking system since has been built on the assumption that repetition is a sign of manipulation rather than relevance.
So why report it at all? Because the two extremes still tell you something. A density of zero across a long draft usually means the page never names its own subject — often because the writer used a synonym throughout and never the phrase people actually search for. A density above about 3% means the phrase is being wedged into sentences that would read better without it, and that tends to travel with other bad habits, like repeating the phrase in every subheading.
Between those extremes the number is noise. Position matters more than frequency, which is why this tool reports where the first match lands rather than only how many there are.
Long sentences and long paragraphs
Neither is a ranking factor, and no tool here will pretend otherwise. They are proxies for whether the page can be read on a phone, which is where most of your traffic will meet it.
A sentence over 25 words usually contains two ideas that would survive being separated. A paragraph over 150 words is a wall of text on a narrow screen, and readers skip walls. Flagging them is a prompt to look, not an instruction to rewrite — technical writing legitimately runs longer, and a rhythm of uniformly short sentences reads like a chatbot.
Reading time as an expectation you set
Reading time is derived at a rate of 225 words a minute, the figure most publishers settle on for plain English. Dense material moves slower and skimmed material moves much faster, so treat it as a planning aid rather than a measurement.
If you publish it at the top of an article, understand what you have done — you have made a promise, and a reader who is still scrolling at twice the stated time trusts the rest of the page a little less.