Are they consuming that many resources or are you mainly looking at bots?

Hi RedBar
Several reasons. Suppliers there plaguing me about stuff not pertinent to my trade. I don't ship there so it is a waste of my time to get enquiries from these places. Bots, spammers, hackers

Hello,

This is your site, so you do what you want, this is not search engines which are going to tell you who you have the right to accept or not on your site.

So until there is a law, forbidding blocking visitors* , you are free to do what you want.

That being said, the eventual impact on ranking, is bounce back. If a visitor reach your site through the SERP, and get refused, he'll return to the SERP, (bounce back). This "might" have an impact on your ranking, since it suggests the visitor did not find what he wanted at your site, and so it "might" influence a search engine in its ranking algorithm.

In the past, this could have had a significant impact , but today, SE are a lot more smarter, and bounce back, can be manipulated too easily. So, today, there is no risk of loosing your ranking, for block visitors from countries which are not your target audience.

* in Europe, such law more or less exist, since sites are not supposed to forbid the access to people refusing cookies. This is not really a law (yet).

Good question and I had wondered that myself. For a website that just supports local businesses it does make sense to block traffic from countries that they do not serve especially since a lot of bot attacks come from these countries. Still this is just a passive security measure and it is easy to get around by using a VPN if someone was so inclined.

Curious how Search Console lists this as I assume Googlebot in Asia (is there such a thing?) would report 404 issues while the one in North America would not.

Overall I do not think it would be a real issue (unless you are blocking a lot of countries) as it is a some what common practice that Google knows about. Then again this is what I think and have not tested it.

I had to do this out of necessity about a year and half ago to one of my sites. It was literally getting crushed by foreign bots. We I looked and realized that 99% of my sales came from North America. I didn't completely block outside countries. I just used CloudFlare's solution to make anyone outside of the North America have to complete a captcha.

It didn't affect the rankings one bit. I'm sure it did in those regions that have to fill out the Captcha, but my normal rankings in regions that mattered to me have only increased since.

have to fill out the Captcha

I find that many of these do not work as intended.

I find that many of these do not work as intended.

What does that mean? Did you mean, they aren't effective at blocking bots?

The CDN Captcha and Blocking Tor clients (in a market where users don't even know what Tor is) has reduced bot activity by 99% on that particular site.