Is the hosting country of a website important for its visibility?
There is no categorical answer to this question as the response depends mainly on the context.
Overall, it is better to host your website as close as possible to the population you're targeting for performance issues only. Yes,always a matter of loading time.
Regarding the SEO, the 2 main criteria used by Google to determine the target audience of a website are: the language of redaction and the domain name.
A ccTLD (Country Code Top Left DOmain) kind domain name such as ".fr" ; ".es" ; or ".en" directly indicates the relevant country.
However, the IP address of the server for a domain name with generic extension (.com ; .info ; .net...) can be, in some case, a criteria used by Google.
