How do I get my site to rank in the right country?

[brianspatterson]

I work with an organization in the United States that purchased a 3 letter .com domain from another company based in the Netherlands.   After transferring the domain and setting up the new site we've completed the following:

• Registered the site in Webmaster Tools and selected the United States as the international target target
• Used Schema  Markup on the US business address
• Built links from US based websites
• Setup a Google My Business site and verified the address
• All site content is in english
• Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website
• Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website

Despite these actions, our website rarely shows up in Google.com search results.  However, we're in the top 10 for many of the same queries when performing searches at Google.nl  -  Interestingly enough, if we set our location for the US and do a search in Google.nl we do not show up in the search results. 
It has been about 18 months since we've completed these actions and Google still assumes our website is best served and targeted towards people in the Netherlands.   Is there anything else we can do to fix this?Thanks!

[Alex-Harford]

The last two points seemed a bit drastic:

• Requested removal of links from sites in the Netherlands that were linking to the old website
• Disavowed all links from the Netherlands that refused to remove links to the old website

The US is a much bigger market than the Netherlands so it's more difficult to rank for anything. Your issue could just be that.

You seem to have covered most things but you haven't mentioned the rel hreflang tag: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Is your server hosted in the Netherlands? I'm thinking out loud, but it shouldn't matter if everything else is set up correctly. How about a US-based phone number? Every signal you can send should help. Are there any customer reviews on the Google page?

[brianspatterson]

Thanks for taking a look and the tips.

Link removal request and disavow was recommended by our contacts at Bing and Google.

Server is not hosted in the Netherlands, however, the old company did host it there.

I understand ranking in the US is more difficult, but the only difference in the search results between the two countries is that we show up in the Netherlands and we don't in the US.  every other site ranking is the same.

I'll take a look at the hreflang tab.

Thanks!

[gfiorelli1]

Was the previous site in the your same niche?

That would explain its "stubborn" high visibility in Google.nl, because you should also consider all the not linked mentions the site may have had in its history.

Hreflang surely would be of help, but sincerely I don't know how you can implement it, because it was not thought for sites targeting only one country, but for multilingual and multi-country, hence Google Webmaster Tool could see it as a mistake and won't consider it.