Basically bounce is one hit session. It is a percentage of sessions in which only one hit was recorded. Bounce rate is a metric that  measures the percentage of visitors who browse your website and do nothing on your page. They do not click on any link like about us, shop now or whatever links you have in the menu bar, Internal links and learn more. It means Google Analytics does not receive any trigger from the user. A user bounces when there has been no engagement  with the landing page and the user ends with a single-page visit. Bounce rate also indicates the quality of your website or quality of your audience. 

How does Google calculate bounce rate?

Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

We can say it collects all sessions where a visitor only visited one page and divides it by all sessions.

Here are some reasons for a high bounce rate:

• Quality of the page is low. There is nothing that invites the visitors to engage with.
• Your audience does not match the purpose of the page, as they would not engage with it
• Visitors have found the information that  they were looking for

What is the importance of bounce rate for SEO? 

When you have a sales page, product page or any page where the user has commercial intent like landing pages, homepages, and service pages. When the traffic is paid for PPC, display or paid social. 

How to lower a high bounce rate for SEO?

The only way of lowering the bounce rate is by stimulating the engagement on your page. There are two ways of looking at bounce rate. First is from a traffic perspective and second is from a page perspective. 

If certain traffic sources have a high bounce rate then you need to look at the expectations of the visitors that are coming to visit your page from those sources.  For Instance, let’s say you are running an ad on another website, and most visitors are coming from that ad to your page that bounce, then that means you are not meeting their expectations. In this case you need to review your ad on that site, and check if it matches the page you are showing. In other words is the site relevant to your page content? If not, then you need to fix that thing.

If your page has all the things that the user wants and it’s relevant to their search intent but still has a high bounce rate then you need to see the page itself. How is the usability of your page? Is there a call to action on the page? Do the pages have internal links that point to related pages or posts? Is the menu of your site easy to use? Do your page invite people to look further on your site. These all things are required to be noticed while optimizing the pages for lowering the bounce rate.