Have you checked against (not provided)? That may well have swallowed a large chunk of branded

BTW, the big (not provided) switch was early March for the UK and it makes a heck of an impact on reporting

Other things to check:

have you stopped any marketing activities in other channels that would have driven brand traffic?

Are your segments correct? Double check, maybe someone changed whats in them. How are you handling (not provided) with respect to assigning brand or non brand?

Very unlikely: tracking code misfiring on your homepage i.e. affects brand count but not longtail

Stephen

not provided isnt anything to do with Panda or Penguin. For pretty much every site its their #1 referring organic keyword - Google doe snot provide keyword info for users who are logged into their services anymore

Have you looked at your keywords? I would be surprised if (not provided) did not stand out massively

NEVER go on whats in the SERPs. Get recommendations - so MOz is a good place to start.

Why not look for the really technical SEO posts on moz and then approach those companies? I can recommend Distilled

You could look at the http://moz.com/community/users users board and pick someone from London that has a ton of points - this indicates they have been helpful to the SEO community over a number of years. I'm at 21 and I am based in London. Marcus Miller is at 12 and he is based in Birmingham

There is also a MOZ recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended

Stephen

We have a couple of guys with MA in philosophy, seems a pretty good fit for SEO

We also get a lot of Business grads applying for jobs, and Ive yet to find anyone who was worthwhile. They seem to get taught such useless rubbish and come in without any idea of what a real marketing job is like

I personally have a MA Social  Media, which is utterly useless, and a BSC Biology which I find incredibly useful

I don't think education level is much of an indicator

S

You want to buy services from a company that is running Google adsense on its front page? Just another spam site

I've been using http://www.outreachr.com/bulk-domain-checker/  to pull data out of batches of urls for this. It goes and grabs link data from SEOmoz and then has a go at getting contact details including twitter etc

(Hope I don't kill his server while hes on holiday by posting this here)