Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone views one page and leaves without a second interaction. In GA4 the equivalent is the inverse of engagement rate, which counts sessions lasting over ten seconds or including a conversion or second page view.
Why it matters for your rankings
Bounce rate is the most misread metric in marketing. A high figure is not automatically bad. A blog post that answers a question completely in ninety seconds should have a high bounce rate, because the visitor got exactly what they came for and left satisfied.
Where it earns attention is on pages designed to lead somewhere. A pricing page or a category page with a 90 percent bounce rate is failing at its job. The metric is also easy to break: duplicate analytics tags fire twice per page and can report an artificially low rate for years. Read it against intent and alongside time on page and scroll depth. Alone it tells you almost nothing, and Google has said repeatedly that it is not a direct ranking factor.
How to check it on your site
Segment by page type
In GA4 open Engagement then Pages and screens, and compare engagement rate across blog, product and pricing templates separately. A single site-wide number is meaningless.
Compare against intent
For each high-bounce page, ask what the visitor came to do. If the page answers a question fully, high bounce is fine.
Check for duplicate tracking
Use the GA Debugger extension or Tag Assistant to confirm only one page_view event fires per load.
Look at the traffic source
Bounce from paid social is normally far higher than from branded search. Compare like with like before drawing conclusions.