Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Are you redirecting everything on www to non-www? If so, you don't really need a robots.txt to be served for the www subdomain. Google will ignore the original robots.txt file if it is given a 301 anyway.

Yes, absolutely. Once you have added one account, just click the blue plus to add another. So long as you have access to the accounts (or are subsequently authorised) you can add as many as you like.

What do the link profiles for each of the pages look like? And what is the traffic source breakdown for the two pages?

Is the new Local Market Analytics beta available for the UK? The details seem to indicate it is US only?

Short answer, given the small amount of work to 301 everything, I'd go for it.

Slightly longer answers:

Does it make sense to "cut bait" from the current site given the lack use?

I wouldn't, I don't see any benefit to doing that. Your site does rank for some keywords and phrases (Not spectacularly, but it does rank none the less), so why chuck that way? 301 the pages to the new domain and host the content there. As a side note, maybe look at url structure for the blog posts at the same time, you might see an uplift in ranking.

Does it make sense to build the site and still set redirects from the old domain pages to a new one?

Yes, as above.

Given so little traffic, is there really an effect on SEO if we sunset the old domain?

Google, in my experience, seems to take a while to "forget" about old sites, even if they are 404ing. Your old content will, for a while, compete with your new site.

Could I strip out the old domain website and just post a message on one page to come to our new site until old domain expires?

Yes, but Google wouldn't understand that.

Sorry, by link profile I meant how many links and of what quality did you have towards each page.

In the age of people rarely actually typing domains directly, rather opting to type a brand name or part of the domain and letting Google et al. do the work, I'm not sure there is much issue having a dash. I'd certainly rather have the shorter domain with a dash than a longer one without.

I guess it depends on how long term you're thinking.

For a shorter term (and less risky) project I would definitely stick with URL 2; Carefully improve the content using elements from URL 1 and then redirect from 1 to 2.

If you're in it for the long term and are open to a (hopefully) short term reduction in rankings, (and therefore traffic) you could do it the other way round. The redirect would pass any link juice across, albeit slightly diluted, and it would not be unreasonable to expect URL 1 to start to rank in a very similar way to URL 2 over time.

If this were a new piece I would certainly guide you towards the longer, more descriptive URL but, given the performance of the existing page, it is a more risky strategy. Your current results clearly show that URL isn't a massive factor!

I don't think there is a definitive answer here, but I hope I have helped a little.

There are a number of different ways, but I'd always start with Google Search Console Coverage reports.

If you haven't already, sign up and configure Search Console.

Then, go to your property > Coverage.

Then select the Valid "tab". You'll then be able to click on the two types of valid ("Submitted and indexed" and "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap"). Within each of these categories, you'll be able to download a CSV of the pages lists.

In the same area you'll be able to see lists of pages that Google knows about but hasn't indexed for one reason or another.

Well, I guess that's the million dollar question.

It's not as simple that Google will simply replace the SERP with the new page. That will be the apparent behaviour until Google updates the listing, as anyone who clicks the link will be redirected, but Google will quickly "notice" and then reapply the algorithm and decide whether the new page should be in the same place. I wouldn't expect that fact that the old page ranked to directly affect the ranking of the newly redirected page, however, the fact that any links to the old page will be being redirected will have an impact.

As far as new rank, I would expect a similar effect to that of simply updating all the content and not changing the URL, and of course, we don't know what exactly would happen then.

If I had to guess, given what you've said, I would say that very specific searches may rank worse (E.g. "double-sided bookmarks") but that more generic terms might rank better (E.g. "customizable bookmarks")

It will be crawled, but Google will generally apply less weighting to any content. Google is generally pretty good at understanding things that are display:none for design reasons and usually won't penalise unless it thinks you are trying to manipulate the system.

That said, if it isn't the main heading, it shouldn't really be H1; you should only have one H1 per page. Although HTML5 allows for multiple H1 within sections of a page, that doesn't really apply here.