Every bounce is a tiny verdict. The visitor arrived with a question, and within seconds decided this page would not answer it. The three usual verdicts: this is not what the link promised, this looks like it will take work to figure out, or this took too long to load. All three are fixable, but only if you know which one you have.
Honesty first: some bounces are success. A visitor who lands on a glossary page, reads the definition, and leaves satisfied bounced by the metric and was served by the page. Judge bounce rate against page intent. A pricing page with a 90 percent bounce is bleeding; a blog post with the same number might be doing its job.
Match the headline to the exact promise of the ad or search result that sent the click. Put the answer, the price shape, or the proof in the first screen. Cut load time, especially on phones, where most local buyers are. And give every page one obvious next step, because pages without a door get treated like walls.
Content pages commonly run 60 to 90 percent; money pages should run far lower. The trend on each page matters more than any average.
Not as a direct metric, but the behavior behind it, visitors returning to the results and clicking a competitor, is exactly what search engines learn from. Fix the cause, not the number.
Lightweight analytics that count a second interaction per visit answer the question. We wire that in as standard on the sites we build.
Everything in this glossary, we build and operate for real businesses. Thirty minutes maps it to yours.