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IT will really depend on your area and the language your customers use.  I have seen the same CTA wording, in the same region perform both amazing and far below expectation, and it had to do with what the end product was and the language that people in the area used when looking for those services.  Your best bet it to run an A/B test yourself and see which CTA responds better to your potential customers.

Alan,

I work with a number of different B2B companies that use email marketing regularly.  You are correct that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to send as we have done a good amount of send time testing and those days always perform poorest.  We have found, across almost all of our clients, that Tuesdays between 11am-1pm EST are the best time to send in the US for our clients, but as Kelly mentioned, you should conduct your own tests to find out when your audience is best engaged.

It could, but it also could help your ranking.  The amount of text is not important as much as how relevant Google sees it compared to the search query, so if you are removing superfluous words and redundant passages they you should see an increase as your pages are more user friendly. If you remove good copy that was considered helpful then you would expect to see decreases.

The point of a sitemap is to tell Google what is on your site so it can index it easier. There is no way, nor any reason why you would want to put external urls onto your sitemap.

I think you would see an overall decrease in your ranking for your key search term.  While the function and rank of a page are important, that page's ranking for each of your websites takes into account many domain level attributes which would not be replicated on a new site that only had your calculator. You better bet would be to work on optimizing not just your calculator page, but also each website as a whole to help increase your position on that keyword.

If you are just building small websites to pump up your main site and not offering quality content, Google will eventually figure this out and you will see a hit for it.  When you are creating content and websites to rank, ask yourself "is this useful to a searcher?" if the answer is no, eventually Google is going to find it and at best just remove it, if you are not lucky you could see a penalty.  I have had much better results taking time to create good content on my main site and promote it rather then trying to trick Google by making low quality content to try and boost up my main sites.

That sounds rough.  What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation.  In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.

Have you created new pages since then that need to be indexed? If you have not created any new pages in sections that are open to be crawled than Google does not need to index any pages. If you have created pages, make sure that your sitemap is automatically updating and that you can see those pages there, then submit and see what happens.

Correlation does not equal causation, is that the only change you made? Did your competitors step up their game recently? Did you loose some backlinks recently? I would dig deeper into why there was a decrease in your ranking while looking at what you can do to improve it with general best practices.

So there are different answers to different parts of your question,

Rank: Without having any content there is nothing to rank, so there is no way of looking into where it would rank for keywords.

Traffic: If you are redirecting from that domain to your new one you will be able to see that traffic in your Google Analytics as referral traffic.

You also should check that domains backlinks, while it may have been strong and good in the past Google has made a number of updates to what it considers spammy links, so what was a good idea back then could be a negative factor now.

If your content cannot be seen without logging in or getting past a "gate" then in general, Google will not serve people to that content.  If you are planning on trying to spoof it so that the Google bot can crawl the content but people cannot see it, don't, Google will find out and then at best you will just see all of your rankings tank. Google wants to searve people the best, easiest content that will give them what they are looking for so if you are not openingly providing that content then Google will not send you traffic for those queries.

When you are using dynamic content on a page, if done properly you should have a no-information option, this is the content that will show for anyone who comes to the page but your CMS does not have any information on them.  This content (what you could consider the page's base content) is what Google will see and rate for relevance.

This is more of a UX questions, but generally if you are delivering a help content, opening it up in a tab is fine. Many times there will be other on pages interactions that a visitor may want to make as well, so you do not want to remove them completely from the page.

Do you have the links set to your listings set to nofollow or the actual listing pages set to noindex? Are their canonicals set on them pointing back to a main page?  There are a number of technical reasons that could cause this problem, but it is hard to say without seeing the site or code.

All three advantages only require a 2nd wordpress instance, you can put them on the same domain level as your current wordpress site. Always use 301 redirects when you are changing, however there still could be a loss of ranking that occurs when you make the switch.

I have never been a fan of paying for "premium" domains, especially since Google put out that the TLD does not affect ranking.  Anytime I am rolling out a new site I will just find the best available option that does not have a bunch of negative baggage associated with it. In general, you should expect to have a harder time ranking a URL with a hyphen in it, but if you are concerned you can always shop around for other .(dot) extensions.

Always go with a 301 redirect as long as your other urls do not have spam links associated with them, I consider it best practice to always do 301s.

If you indexed a new page and it ranked first for a bit, you got lucky. It looks like Google caught up to it and gave your page a proper ranking.  Keep working on building links and optimizing your content to be as user friendly as possible and you may get back to that 1dt slot eventually.

Alan,

Triggered emails can be very effective when done right, the key I have found is making sure that your follow up email provides your potential client with value (not money or a discount, just value). A

As for to many emails, you should be able to cap your send frequency to people so that you do not get excessive. I try not to send more than 2 emails a week and only if the person does a high value action or specifically requests it.

When you first start sending emails (especially if you have not been using this list regularly) you will see a larger amount of unsubscribes, this is normal anytime you start getting in front of customers more often, don't worry, the people unsubscribing from 1-2 monthly emails were not going to become customers.  Really what it comes down to is you will need to feel out your niche, some industries it is great to do weekly sends, others once a month can be to much.

It should not have any effect on SEO.  From a UX perspective you may want to see if you can just detect their location instead of interrupting their consumption of your site with a pop up.