Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You are welcome Andrew. Yes, Mozcast is pretty nifty!

For some webmasters, Google has been mysterious for the past year. Duplicate content, thin content, spun content, lots of ads above-the-fold, ugly design and other site characteristics are blamed for reduced rankings. I have a site that contains some republished government content and some very short blog posts.  Some pages on that site saw reduced rankings in October.  We noindexed the duplicate and thin content in November plus cut back on some ads and most rankings recovered in January. Lots of very experienced SEOs are guessing at what factors Google is using. Anybody who tells you what to do based upon the minimal information that you provided is guessing. Anything that you can do to strengthen your content to a unique and substantive position would probably be time well spent - even if it is not your current problem.   You say that you don't have ads, so you can eliminate that as a potential problem.

Hi Alan, Thanks for your response and a very valid point. Duplicate content wont be a big issue as brand.com is very light on content for each location so the sub domain will have a lot of new content (and some re-written content). Good tip on the regional data. Will make sure we implement this.