Bounce rate itself is not a direct ranking factor in Google's algorithm. Google has explicitly stated they don't use Google Analytics metrics for rankings, and bounce rate is an Analytics-specific metric that varies wildly by industry and page type. A blog post might have 80% bounce rate and rank perfectly fine because users got their answer and left satisfied. What actually matters is user engagement signals that correlate with bounce rate. When someone lands on your page, immediately hits back, and clicks a different result (pogo-sticking), that tells Google your page didn't satisfy the query. Dwell time under 10 seconds on informational pages usually signals a problem. Google measures these through Chrome data, Android, and their own search results page, not through Analytics. High bounce rates become an SEO problem when they reflect genuine UX failures. If your homepage bounces at 85% because it loads in 8 seconds on mobile, has intrusive popups, or the content doesn't match what the title promised, users leave frustrated and Google notices the pattern across thousands of visits. Commercial pages with 60%+ bounce rates often have trust issues, unclear calls-to-action, or they're ranking for the wrong keywords. Context matters enormously. A local business contact page with 75% bounce rate is normal because people found the phone number and called. An e-commerce category page at 75% suggests broken filters or poor product selection. Recipe sites expect 65-80% because users grab the recipe and leave. At Ottawa SEO, we don't obsess over bounce rate percentages. We look at the combination: bounce rate plus time-on-page plus conversion rate. If a landing page has 70% bounce but 3-minute average sessions and 8% conversions, that's healthy. If it's 70% bounce with 22-second sessions and 0.4% conversions, we have a content relevance or technical problem to fix. The SEO impact comes from fixing the underlying issue, not manipulating the metric.