Keyword Proximity Checker

Check keyword proximity in your text free online. See how close together two target keywords appear, since tighter proximity can strengthen topical relevance signals.

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How to Use This Tool

Enter your two keywordsAdd the two related terms you want to check

Paste your contentAdd the body text where these keywords appear

Check the resultSee the closest distance between any mention of each term

A Minor Signal Worth Understanding, Not Obsessing Over

Keyword proximity belongs to an older era of SEO thinking, when search engines relied more heavily on literal text patterns to infer topic relationships. The idea was straightforward: if "running" and "shoes" appear right next to each other repeatedly, the page is probably specifically about running shoes, as opposed to a page that separately discusses running in one section and shoes in an unrelated section.

This checker measures the closest distance between any mention of your two specified keywords across your text, giving you that proximity figure as one small data point alongside the more impactful SEO factors that deserve more of your attention.

Why This Matters Less Than It Used To

Modern search algorithms understand semantic relationships across a full page far better than they did when proximity was a more heavily weighted signal. A well-written page that naturally discusses the relationship between two concepts, even with some distance between specific keyword mentions, communicates that relationship to today's algorithms through broader contextual understanding, not just word adjacency.

The One Genuinely Useful Application

Beyond any SEO consideration, if you're writing content meant to connect two concepts and a proximity check shows they're never mentioned anywhere near each other, that's a legitimate signal the writing might not actually be making that connection clearly for human readers either — which is worth knowing and fixing regardless of search engine signals.

Frequently Asked Questions

It measures how close together two related keywords appear within your text — measured in words between them. Search engines have historically given some weight to keywords appearing near each other as a signal that the content discusses the relationship between those terms, not just mentioning them separately.

Its weight has diminished significantly as search engines have gotten better at understanding semantic relationships across an entire page rather than relying on literal word distance. It's a minor, secondary signal at best in modern SEO, not something to heavily optimize around.

No. Awkwardly restructuring a sentence purely to reduce word distance between two keywords usually produces worse, more robotic-sounding writing than the marginal proximity benefit could ever be worth. Write naturally first.

Useful mainly as a quick sanity check — if your two main topic keywords never appear anywhere near each other across thousands of words of content, that might genuinely indicate the content doesn't connect those concepts as directly as intended, which is worth knowing regardless of any SEO angle.

Density measures how often a keyword appears relative to total word count. Proximity measures the distance between two different keywords when they do appear. A page can have great density for both terms while still having poor proximity if they're always mentioned in unrelated sections.