Nigel has provided a comprehensive answer and was very generous to put so much effort and time into it.   I agree with his assessment.

I am always tempted to "start another website".  However, if I do that I must take my efforts away from websites that are already successful and put that effort into websites that are starting with zero content, zero fans, zero visibility, zero resources of any kind.

If you can afford hire and toss another team of high quality people at improving the sluggish site then maybe you can pull it off, but if your primary website is not dominating the SERPs in your area, then I would probably put that same team to work on the primary site.

I would not start a second website or put resources into a secondary website unless my main website is dominating the SERPs and then I would still be working to raise the bar to fend off anyone out there who is getting any ideas about coming after my turf.

Nigel's suggestions are right on.

We redirected subdomains into folders on the main site and the results were KICKASS.     KICKASS.  We started producing a lot more traffic and making a lot more money.

Every business will get a few bad reviews.  The Pope could be selling Bibles and get bad reviews from cranky customers or customers who blame the Pope when the package is lost on the mail.

The client probably has a nice business, is perfectly honest and does an excellent job.  Don't worry about one review.

A thought about blocking competitors...  Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything.  If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers.  If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower.

Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site.  So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales.  When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product.

We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors.  The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering.

At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out.  At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header.  These options are built into our design.

I don't have any formal testing to back these observations.  These are simply what I have noticed by experimenting with affiliate programs for twenty years.

**  I believe that google strongly dislikes "thin affiliate" websites.  These are sites that are monetized by affiliate links but that have very little real content or low value content.  I believe that they are subjected to a "quality filter" that is more strict than the "Panda" algorithm.

**  If you link to affiliate websites, expect those links to drive the affiliate site higher in the organic SERPs.  So, if you are competing in the organic against the affiliate program site, you will empower them at your own expense.

**  I have used Adsense on all of my websites since the first week that Adsense was available.  I've learned how much money different ad positions on the page can produce with Adsense, then I have compared that to what affiliate ads produce in the same position.  Adsense almost always make more money - not a little more money, a lot more money.

**  I have also compared the amount of money that I can make using affiliate links to the amount of money that I can make by stocking the product and filling the orders myself.  I make a lot more money filling the orders myself.  There is no comparison.

**  What I have not tested is how much can be earned by using hypertext affiliate links within the paragraphs of my content.  In those locations, I am using links to sales pages on my own website or to articles on my site that are relevant to the links.  I am confident that the sales links to products that I sell and fulfill myself will make a lot more money.  I think that links to my own article content are valuable, but if they are more valuable than a small commission, I can't answer - but I'd rather keep the visitor on my own website.

I agree with James... but if you place all of these links at the bottom of the page you will not make much money.

Also, consider who persists to the bottom of your articles.  They are your very best visitors and your potential evangelists and linkerati.  Instead of blowing them off to an affiliate site, recommend more of your content to them.

And... when your affiliate links are higher up on the page your less interested visitors or your highly distractible visitors will use them and you will make money as they leave - probably a LOT more money.

All of my best producing ads are high on the page and the bottom of my page is where I recommend more content.  I learned not to sell my most valuable visitors.

I would make a permanent page.

If you want to preserve the historic information, make a new page for it... or a new page for each year... and link to them from the permanent page.

Don't do redirects unless you have to.

their own business name

In almost every instance page one organic position should be possible in a reasonable amount of time... and if they are a local business the time required for them to be in the #1 organic position should be quite short.

keywords they want to rank for

Some keywords have brutal competition and in many cases page 1 organic rankings will either be impossible for the business or so costly that acquiring them will not make economic sense.   The problem that many clients face is that they have hired an SEO who doesn't really know what is required to attain the desired ranking, charges the customer a certain amount per month, and the SEO does not have the ability to pull of the desired ranking even if the budget was 5x as much.  In these cases the client is left in anticipation that goes unfulfilled.

So, the SEO needs to:  1) know what the client wants; 2) determine the business reward for acquiring it; then, 3) explain the probability, the cost, the timeframe for acquiring it (making disclaimers that aggressive efforts of other businessess in the space can move all of these goalposts at anytime).  Then the client is fully informed and they can search search search with little concern to the SEO that they are looking for to deliver results.

Might be a robot checking to see if you have changed anything. Lots of people use these.

Might be a competitor waiting for you to publish something and then grab it.

Full link juice is now passed through redirects.   Google stopped dinging the value of links that pass through a redirect about a year ago.   More info here....

http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608

Use both.

Breadcrumbs help search engines and visitors understand the structure of your website.

In-content links get clicked by visitors, and they might pass anchor text value to pages within your site.

Right now my company is blogging five days a week, which is way more than our competitors and most other companies do.

Five days a week might be focusing on quantity.

Blogging will not do anything for your website if the content is not quality... and when I say quality, I mean good enough to attract traffic and natural links.   If you are not blogging quality you might be adding dead weight to your website and it might even be Panda bait.

Look at your analytics.  Are your blog posts pulling in any traffic.  Are they pulling in any conversions.  Are they attracting natural links from respectable websites?   If they are not doing these things then blogging for blogging's sake is a waste of time.

Instead of comparing how many times you blog per week, take a look at how your quality compares with your competitor.  Determine if the content is useful to your visitors and be very critical and honest with yourself.   Are your visitors even seeing it?  Does it answer their relevant questions about how to use your products, how to select them, how to maintain them, other information about them?

If you are blogging daily and are doing a good job there should be a lot of visitors to your website who arrive through your blog home page or arrive through the main page of your website and click into your blog.  If that isn't happening then, maybe your blogging is not useful.

Do the assessments above, reflect upon your plan and don't worry about how many days per week you are blogging.  Worry about if you are blowing your competitors out of the water with the content that you are producing.