I have both .ca and .com domains of my website. The website is meant for international audience, but it is important to be associated with Canada though. (the website is about Canadian immigration)
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with .ca domain?
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with.
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
It's the same thing, depends on audience targeting. If you are targeting the outside from Canada, then .com is prefered. It's common logic. If you are targeting my country (Croatia) it would be prefered / good to put .hr domain up.
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with .ca domain?
Well, this is a tricky part. It depends on amount of SEO effort that you are going to put on page this page. But yes, it's true. It would be harder to rank higher with .ca domain.
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with.
It's true, it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with, however... if your site is going for international audience, then .com is prefered. But, it's ok to use 301 redirect to your .com domain.
In seo , many factor is responsible for rank a website like Quality content,high and relevant back links,social signals. It doesn't really matter which one you promote but quality of submission is matter.
I think i would keep both toplevel-domains and use the hreflang tag in the header to show google which domain belongs to which location. That should fix the duplicate content issue and you should rank a little bit better (maybe, who knows). it's described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Usually the country domains get preferred within the country, so you would get a boost within Canada if you go with .CA. However in your case your audience is mostly from abroad, so perhaps if you do 3xx redirect from CA to COM would do you better service.
P.S. Keep in mind that sometimes people who view the search results may prefer or trust domains associated with the country. But this has to be tested with your audience.
As you mentioned in your question the the website is meant for an international audience. SEO ranking aside the international audience will be much more used to the .com domain than the .ca TLD.
As of today the TLD does not matter much as long as you are not using free TLDs that are often associated with scams (suck as .tk for example). In fact Google has explicitly mentioned that the TLD is often ignored and making a website about a museum using the .museum domain (yes it exists http://about.museum/) will not help you at all.
Search engines are actively trying to incorporate localization - the Russian search engine Yandex for example offers different results depending on the neighbourhood of the user. With this in mind it is important to decide whether local Canadians or the international audience is your primary target in order to future-proof your website.
Another important question which you asked is whether it matters which website you promote (co or com). Technically there is almost no difference when it comes to the power of the accumulated links (which boost your search ranking), however you must have in mind that this could change any day.
Currently many black-hat SEOs link to short domain redirects and point these links to the websites that they want to rank. Google will inevitably find a way to penalize them, so I advice promoting the main website not the redirect.
Additionally make sure to use a 301 redirect not a 302 or javascript redirect as they are completely different in the eyes of search engines.
I would make the .ca and .com point to the same site, but promote the .com domain as it's for a wide range of users. So the canonical address will be the .com but canadians will probably get the .ca one as google is prefering local content.
If your services are limited to Canada and you have multiple local stores in various cities, then .ca domain will help you to rank better in Canada search results.
If your customers spread across the globe then using .com is advisable. You are serving international customers and have just .ca domain doesn't make sense to the users as well search engines.
So if you are specific to one country, use country specific domains like .CA other wise use .COM for a global presence.
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