Updated · Built and checked by the PlinzoTools team, formulas tested against published sources
Check how early your target keyword first appears in a piece of content.
Enter a keyword and content to check its prominence.
Keyword prominence measures how early your target keyword first appears in a piece of content -- content that mentions its main keyword early is often considered more clearly focused on that topic. This tool finds your keyword's first occurrence and reports it both as a character position and as a percentage of the total content length.
Paste your content and enter your target keyword. The first-occurrence position and prominence percentage appear instantly.
The tool lowercases both your content and your keyword, trims the keyword, and looks for the first place the keyword text occurs. That position is a character index counting from zero. The score shown is 100 minus the position expressed as a percentage of the total content length, rounded to a whole number for display. A keyword that starts at the very first character scores 100 percent, and a keyword that first appears exactly halfway through the text scores 50 percent. The higher the number, the earlier the first mention.
Prominence % = 100 − (first character position ÷ total characters × 100)
Note that the score measures only the first mention. It says nothing about how many times the keyword appears afterward, so a page that mentions the phrase once in the opening line and never again scores the same as one that repeats it fifty times.
Suppose your pasted article is 2,000 characters long and the phrase you are targeting first appears at character 300, which is roughly the end of a short opening paragraph. The position is 300 divided by 2,000, or 15 percent, so the prominence score is 85 percent. If you rewrite the introduction so the phrase appears in the first sentence, at character 40, the position is 2 percent and the score becomes 98 percent. If a long anecdote pushes the first mention out to character 1,400, the score falls to 30 percent. These numbers are hypothetical, but they show how sensitive the score is to introductions that take a long time to get to the point.
The score is computed on exactly what you paste, so paste the text you actually want measured. If you copy an entire rendered page, navigation menus, cookie notices, and sidebar text can come first and push your real first mention far down the measured text. Paste only the main article body when you want to evaluate the writing itself. If you paste raw HTML, tags and attributes count as characters, which inflates the total length and shifts positions, so plain text is the better input. If your keyword sits in the title or a heading that you did not paste, the tool cannot see it.
Treat the number as a prompt for editing, not as a target to maximize. A very high score simply tells you the phrase appears near the beginning. For many articles, that is easy to achieve naturally by stating the topic in the first sentence. A moderate score is not a problem if the opening is a genuine hook that leads into the topic in the second paragraph. A low score on a page that is meant to rank for a specific phrase is worth a second look: ask whether a reader landing from a search result would see confirmation, within the first few lines, that they are in the right place. That reader-first framing is the useful takeaway, since search engines are described as evaluating the whole page and its usefulness rather than a single position metric.
Pair this check with a keyword density count and a review of your title and heading text for a fuller picture of how focused a page is on its topic.
The tool will clearly indicate the keyword wasn't found in the content.
It's a long-standing on-page SEO best practice, not a documented, confirmed algorithm signal -- treat it as good writing practice (clarity for readers) rather than a guaranteed ranking lever.
The character position is the raw index where the first match begins. The percentage converts that into a relative measure by subtracting the position share of the total length from 100, so earlier mentions produce higher scores regardless of how long the text is.
No. It reports only the first occurrence. For repetition counts you would need a keyword density tool, and repetition should still be driven by natural writing rather than a quota.
The match is a literal substring search, so a different word form, a hyphen instead of a space, or an extra space inside the phrase will prevent a match. Copy the phrase exactly as it appears in the text, or check that you pasted the section that contains it.
Not necessarily. A score of 100 only means the text begins with the keyword. Write the opening for readers first, and use the score as a quick check that the topic is stated early enough.
Reference: Google Search Central