Ranking an EMD

2016-2017 have not been a good year for SEO. However, it looks like country-level domains are much easier to rank apparently - for its respective country. An EMD for a specific country would have a little more weight as compared to a general .COM, etc. And you should also probably invest in the domain's registration years - renew the domain for 5 or 10 years in advance, and it looks like that provides a boost in SERP.