Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who bounce on the site.
A bounce is basically someone entering a page on the site and having no interaction or visiting no other pages on the site and then leaving from that page.
Example: someone finds us on Google, lands on a particular page of our site then leaves right away. That’s a bounce.
Bounce is important to understand in SEO because it helps to know which page have a high bounce rate and then taking the appropriate actions to handle them.
Now here’s an example of when high bounce is not a problem. You are testing a page with a different phone number and you realize that a lot of people are calling from that page despite a high bounce rate. This most probably mean that people land on your page, call you and then simply leave, even though they may have purchased something over the phone!
But really, most of the time, high bounce pages should be looked into and somehow corrected.
Patrick