Does not having any hreflang tags for U.S Visitors lead to an increase in International Visitors?

[MichaelAtMSP]

I have seen a massive increase in International Visitors on our website and visitors within the United States dropped off hard this month (by about 20%). Could it be possible that not having any hreflang tags can lead to an increase in International Customers visiting the site even though your sitemap is set to "Target users in United States" within the Google Search Console?

In the Google Search Console, I have International Targeting set to  "Target users in United States." However, Google Search Console is saying our site doesn't have any hreflang tags. In the Google Search Console, it says "Your site has no hreflang tags. Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages." I'm not sure when that was flagged, but recently we have seen a massive increase in International Visitors to our site from countries such as Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and so on. This poses a problem since our chances of turning one of those visitors into a customer is extremely slim. Along with that, nearly every international customer is contributing to an extremely high Bounce Rate.

Attached is a screenshot of the Error about hreflang tags. https://imgur.com/a/XZI45Pw

And here is a screenshot of the Country we are targeting. https://imgur.com/a/ArpWe9Z

Lastly, attached is a screenshot of all of the Countries that visited our site today:  https://imgur.com/a/d0tNwkI

[effectdigital]

It could easily be possible. Google usually takes the most specific directive when multiple directives contradict each other

If you previously had your site targeting 'international' in GSC and you had US hreflangs, Google would have still targeted to USA as US directive is more specific

Since you say you had targeting set to USA (and still do) and you may have had US hreflangs which were removed, this is a bit odd. Even without hreflangs, the GSC target US users directive is still more specific and thus Google 'should' default back to that

That being said, hreflangs might be a bit of a harder directive as they are actually coded onto your web pages. It may also be Google ignoring GSC directives for some sites to try and 'encourage' more webmasters to embrace hreflangs and proper internationally targeted websites

Google won't look at your bounce rate I don't think. Certainly not from Google Analytics (as that's your own data and it's also really easy to manipulate, e.g: you could use JS to detect what country people are connecting from and when you serve the pages you could strip out the analytics tracking script, thus lowering the bounce rate). Google use their own data, mostly the metrics from Search Console (clicks, impressions etc)

People talk about bounce rate being bad because it's bad UX (usually) and Google wants sites built with proper UX, sites that are useful to people. But the aim is to make your site better so that real people won't bounce as easily, not to get better GA bounce-rate metrics (which aren't used in Google's algorithm). Of course Google must have a way to evaluate something similar, but that number in that database wouldn't be 'the one' that they factor

I would try embedding the relevant hreflangs to support your geo-targeting and additionally checking what GSC property has your US settings in.  You can always block traffic from other countries, like how if you try to view a certain series on Netflix from the UK which is only available in the USA - it says "this show isn't available in your region". If you really care that much, just do something similar (this page is not available in your region)