International SEO goes beyond hreflang tags. Hreflang tags alone are not enough to ensure country-specific site ranks in search engines.
Every country is assigned a specific country code top-level domain (ccTLD). Purchasing a local ccTLD gives you an SEO advantage as search engines favor local websites over generic ones.
Google Search Console provides you with the manual geotargeting of the gTLDs such as .com or .NET through a Set Geographic Target tool. This helps you reach out to target, country-specific users.
To improve rankings Google and foreign search engines need to understand the content. It is thus essential to use language declaration tags to indicate the target language of the site.
Localized content that caters to the target country gives the local users a better user experience and helps boost international SEO for your website.
A website serving a specific country needs to have incoming links from websites belonging to the same country to rank on SERPs since search engines detect the geographical location of a site.
Adapting these international SEO techniques along with the use of hreflang tags can help boost your ranking on foreign search engines and be visible in their local market.