This one is complicated... canonicals, href lang tags and no index

[Algorhythm_jT]

Bear with me, this is complicated (I REALLY hope one of you comes along and says, no it isn't!)

Scenario

A client has multiple english pages, as they have a unique product offering in AUS, US, UK, NZ and also have a global site in english.

Obviously there is a lot of duplicate content and they have the relevant href lang tags set-up to help Google untangle what should be ranked where. They also have rel-canonical on each page.

I've set-up search console for each of the folder structures, i.e. en-us, en-gb, en-au and so on.

They have an optimised page for one of their primary keywords, which ranks nowhere for this exact keyword, but this page DOES rank for 40 similar keywords.

For the exact keyword, they rank 52nd, and frustratingly, it's the homepage that ranks.

We know the correct page is ranking and is indexed because search console tells us so and we see the exact page appear in SERPs for the other 40 keywords.

When I look at the en-us site in Search Console, it tells me that the home page is not being indexed, because a rel canonical tag is prioritising an alternative page (probably the global site) - however, the en-us homepage is showing up in rankings for a lot of their important keywords.

The site has been live for 6 months and the optimised page for about 3 months.

Questions

1. If search console is saying the homepage is not ranking, how is it showing up in SERPs?
2. Why is the homepage ranking for this important keyword, when there is virtually no mention of the keyword versus the page that is almost perfect according to Moz's on-page grader?
3. Do you need href lang tags AND rel canonical on a page?
4. How long before a new page that is optimised for a keyword take to replace (and hopefully surpass) the homepage?
5. If the US is the most important market, should we guide Google to that fact using rel-canonical?

Really appreciate your feedback, hivemind.

Thanks

[paints-n-design]

1. Search Console tells you, that they use a canonical for the homepage, that doesn't mean John Mueller is talking about that in this webmaster hangout (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAagTHeF9N0)

2. I can just guess, think it could be a structure thing, and maybe it is to fresh - 6 month old site with several regions set-up in same language. So a lot of duplicates, canonicals aso Google has to deal with. And of course, Homepage is strong, your landingpage may not be strong enaugh.   And whatever happens on Googles Page 5 is more or less useless data. If it still happens when you are on page 2, guess than there is a real problem.  At the moment, without knowing anything, asuming hreflangs, canonicals are right, think it is a structure, time, pagerank combined thing.

3. You can use canonicals and it depends, if you need them, you need them - no matter if hreflang in use or not.  You have to send the same signals, not confusing once. I think here is helpful stuf about hreflang and canonicals working together (https://www.searchviu.com/en/hreflang-canonical/)

4. It depends on depth, difficulty, and a lot more factors. I cant say anything here without topic or domain / page

5. You use hreflang, so you tell google what to rank where. Sending confusing signals (hreflang to a page wich has a canonical to anywhere wich has an hreflang-back  to that page. Nice confusing chain... ) google will start to ignore your canonicals in this case

Hope that helps a bit