Final verdict:

I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."

Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.

I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:

Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).

Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?

Still no breakthroughs on this issue. Our performance keeps improving on .ca and .com, which is obviously good, but our ranking on .com is always very, very far behind our .ca performance.

It's still a mystery to me, given that most of the inbound links are from U.S.-based, .com websites.

The only answer that works in my mind is that .ca uses a different algorithm. But I'm still very interested in hearing other thoughts!

Thanks,

Rob

Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!

Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.

One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.

Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?

Final verdict:

I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."

Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.

I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.

Thanks everyone.

Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!

Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.

One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.

Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?

Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:

Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).

Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?