Bounce Rate
The percentage of users who leave your site without taking action. High bounce rates often signal weak relevance or poor user experience.
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions in which a user visits a single page on your website and leaves without clicking through to any other page or taking any measurable action. A high bounce rate on a landing page suggests visitors are failing to find what they expected, the content is lacking enough engagement to explore further, or they found their answer immediately, which is often a neutral outcome.
In Google Analytics 4, the equivalent metric is "engagement rate", which measures the proportion of sessions that are engaged (lasting longer than 10 seconds, visiting more than one page, or triggering a conversion event). High engagement rate is generally positive and low engagement rate flags pages worth investigating.
For care home websites, context determines whether a high bounce rate is a problem. A contact page with a high bounce rate is expected, as people visit, find the phone number, and leave to call. A service page or care type page with a high bounce rate suggests something is failing: the content fails to match the search intent of visitors arriving from Google, the page loads too slowly, or the page structure makes it hard to find the information people came for.
Bounce rate exists as an indirect signal rather than a direct Google ranking factor, but the underlying behaviours it reflects, such as dwell time, engagement, or whether users return to search results to try another result, are signals Google observes. A page that consistently produces immediate returns to search results signals to Google that the page failed to satisfy the search intent, which contributes to ranking pressure over time.