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I've got a client in a similar situation. They have a .com domain but they only offer services in Australia. The good news is they rank just fine for the search terms that are relevant to their business (these are primarily queries with local intent). In Webmaster Tools, you'll want to tell Google that your site is targeted to an AU audience. There's an option to set this under "Search Traffic" -> "International Targeting".  Click the "Country" tab and then you can choose to target users in a particular country. We also made sure that it was very clear from the content on the site that the business was based in Australia paying particular attention to local search optimisation (See: http://moz.com/learn/local ) - getting local business listings in reputable, authoritative directories etc. It's best to think of it from a visitors point of view - what are the on-page signals you need to provide to give them confidence that they are dealing with an Australian site. (Local address, Australian phone number, mentions of relevant places / people / events, associations/badges/certifications from relevant Australian bodies etc...) Hope this helps - Good Luck! Doug.

Fiona, Just to be clear, what you're referring to are subdomains, and not domains. You're right, though, there are definitely issues related to duplicate content that is going to cause ranking problems. Typically, Google will rank the content that they crawled first: the others will be the duplicates. The best way to deal with this is to decide which subdomain you really want: which will typically be www.clientdomain.com and then 301 redirect all of the others to www.clientdomain.com. If, however, there is unique content on the other subdomains, then you wouldn't want to redirect those.

No, the owner of brandname.com will not necessarily outrank your client.If they are an established brand, they will have a lot of natural links from a If the client owns the trademark, they can go through the WIPO process to get that domain.