What is keyword stuffing?
It's cramming the same words into a page — in headings, paragraphs, city lists, footers — past the point where a human would ever write that way, hoping to rank harder. It's the SEO tactic from 2009 that still won't die, and it's active on 23 of the 28 real sites in our audit corpus. Check in 60 seconds: read your homepage out loud. Any sentence you stumble over because the same phrase keeps landing in it — that's the smell.
The audit checks this on every page it crawls — up to 25 pages — and names every offender in the report.
The definition, in plain English
What our engine actually checks
Rule content/keyword-stuffing · severity: warning · flagged on 23 of the 28 real audits behind our statistics page
The audit analyses word-frequency distributions across each crawled page and flags pages where one or two words or short phrases appear far above natural density — typically well past the point where the text still reads like human writing. It also catches the structural variants: boilerplate blocks of repeated location names copied across many pages, and headings that repeat the same keyphrase where variety would be natural.
In the corpus: 23 of 28 sites triggered the warning, usually without the owner having any idea — most stuffing today is inherited from an over-zealous SEO plugin's "optimization score", a copywriter following outdated advice, or a location-page template from 2018.
Why it matters, honestly sized
This is the one finding on the list that can actively hold your rankings down. Google's spam policies name keyword stuffing explicitly; pages that trip the pattern compete at a discount, and the section-level or page-level demotion is invisible — you just rank worse than the content deserves and never get a notification.
The second cost is human: stuffed copy reads badly, and visitors bounce. A page that says the same phrase nine times answers nobody's question, and both the algorithm and the customer converge on the same verdict. Local-service sites with templated city pages carry the highest risk — dozens of near-identical pages differing only in the town name is the classic doorway-page + stuffing combination.
The fix, step by step
- Read the flagged pages out loud. Every phrase you'd never say to a customer, cut or rewrite. This single pass fixes most mild cases.
- Aim for natural density, not a percentage. There's no magic ratio; if the keyword appears where it naturally belongs — title, one heading, first paragraph, a couple of times in the body — you're done. Synonyms and related terms ("electrician", "electrical repair", "wiring work") do the ranking work without the repetition.
- Fix the templates. If the stuffing lives in a location-page or service-page template, rewrite the template once rather than thirty pages. Give each real page genuinely local content — or delete the pages that only exist to hold a town name.
- Un-install the bad advice. Check SEO plugins' "content analysis" for old-school density targets, and fire any copywriter or agency still quoting keyword percentages.
- Re-check after a few weeks — ranking recovery from de-stuffing is gradual, and the absence of the warning is your progress marker.
What the £7.99 report checks — and what it can't
Everything here that can be checked from outside your site is mechanical, and mechanical is checkable. Full disclosure: some of it isn't, and we say which. The report is the full 21-category audit — what it costs and how it compares to doing it yourself are on their own pages.
The mechanical half
Checked across up to 25 pages per audit, with every offending page named and the exact fix spelled out.
- word-frequency anomalies across every audited page
- repeated-phrase patterns in headings and boilerplate
- the location-page template pattern — near-duplicate pages differing by town name
- heading hierarchy and thin-content signals in the same content pass
— Not ours to claim
What no report sold from outside your site can do:
- The report detects statistically abnormal repetition — mechanical proof, not literary taste. It won't call well-written copy stuffed, and it can't tell you which city pages deserve unique content versus deletion; that's a judgement call the fix list frames for you.
Fair questions, straight answers
Is keyword stuffing still penalised in 2026?
Yes — it's named in Google's own spam policies as a practice that can lead to manual action or algorithmic demotion. The nuance: most stuffed pages aren't manually penalised, they're just quietly out-ranked, because the pattern itself is a quality signal. Either way the effect is the same: stuffing now does the opposite of what it did in 2009.
What keyword density is safe?
Stop thinking in percentages — there is no safe density formula, and chasing one is how stuffing starts. Write the page for a human; if the keyword falls in the title, a heading, the opening and a few body sentences, the density lands where it lands. Our detector flags statistical outliers, not pages that merely mention their topic.
Are location/city pages keyword stuffing?
They can be. A handful of city pages with genuinely local content — projects, reviews, service details for that area — are fine. Thirty pages differing only in the swapped town name, each repeating "plumber in {city}" a dozen times, are the classic doorway-page pattern and get treated as spam. Quality per page is the line.
How do I know if my site has keyword stuffing without a tool?
Read your five most important pages out loud, slowly. Stuffed text is physically hard to read — the same phrase keeps interrupting sentences. Then check your headings: if several H2s on one page repeat the same keyphrase with tiny variations, that's the pattern. The audit makes it mechanical, but your ear gets you 80% there.
Find out if your copy reads like spam to Google.
Enter your URL and pay securely — your report PDF lands in your inbox in ~30 minutes,
with keyword-repetition, thin-content and heading checks across every page.