Despite Matt Cutts categorically saying Google does not use bounce rate data in their search rankings at SMX a couple of years ago, many SEOs still believe that Google does bounce rate, and demotes sites and/or pages that have a higher bounce rate.

Someone asked the question to Gary Illyes from Google on Twitter, and he replied that Google does not use Analytics or bounce rate in their search rankings.

Many believe that Google tracks bounce rate, not through Analytics, but by using data that shows when a searcher clicks through to a site, and then clicks on another result in that same set of search results in a very short period of time, especially since Google does track those clicks.

That said, it is always good to try and improve your bounce rate.  If your bounce rate is high, you should be looking at it and considering ways that you might encourage visitors to stick around.  Are you including links to other articles?  Is your content poorly written resulting in the bounces?  Or if you drill down to the data, do you have a lot of visitors that may visit frequently but just happen to visit 1-2 pages at a time, but rack up considerably more page views over time?