International Targeting in GSC

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Mark Walker: In search console it will automatically select UK for you, and sadly won’t give an option to change
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  Neil Cheesman: Thanks - for some reason I thought it was changeable... must have been another site.
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  Benjamin James Barker: All cctld`s are set and can not be changed in GSC. You can use hreflang to target those other english speaking countries but to be honest i wouldn`t advise that with a cctld as I`ve never seen examples of this working well.If the traffic and revenue from other countries is a fair chunk then it might be worth looking in to either migrating to a .com or buying up country level domains and mapping a strategy out for those separately
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  Neil Cheesman: I have set hreflang as there is a german site with virtually the same content - only about 30+ pages - both sites struggling atm
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  Ammon Johns: I`ve had some CCTLDs do exceptionally well internationally. Ultimately, Google look at regionalisation of results more by relevancy signals such as where the links are coming from, and also regional brand search and demand.
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  Ammon Johns: In other words, if sites in NYC are linking to you, and users of data centers that serve the NY region have demand for the site, it will turn up in those results, even if the site is on a CCTLD for some pacific island.
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  Jim Munro: What Ammon said and also: I don`t think anything is more useful than where you choose to locate the hosting, the cctld is not really relevant to this question except that the cctld is automatically targetted, you cannot set it in GSC. BTW, you can rank a subdomain of a cctld from the other side of the globe and still pull a shed-load of UK visitors provided you host it in London or somewhere else in the UK so I guess another suggested answer to this question might be to invest in something like Akamai or Cloudflare where you are hosted all over the world.