I am saying this as a business owner and as a former employee who has foot prints on his back....

The business owner should be well aware of the number of clients, the amounts that they are charging, and the number of people who are on staff to do this work.  It seems to me that a choice is being made to collect payments rather than to provide service.

Some people might not like what I am going to say, but if I was the employee here, I would find another job rather than work in an effort to improve this company.  Their actions are likely deliberate.

You have a very generous attitude and ethic that deserves a better work situation.  I hope that you discover an employer who deserves you!

I wish you all the best.

This is a really good answer.

Don't allow your clients to learn how many hours per month they are getting.

In my opinion it is bad to allow infringing content to appear on other websites.   These are duplicate content.  It is possible that they will outrank you in the SERPs or result in your page being filtered from the search results.   Also, if you work hard to produce this content then you want people coming to your site to see it - not to the websites of others.  If it appears on websites all over the web then why should people visit your website?   Finally, if these folks use the content and give you an attribution link, that communicates to everyone who sees it that your content is available for reuse.

Google says that they are good at recognizing the original source of content, however, I know from experience that they are far from perfect.  Some SEOs believe Google, and advise clients to distribute their content as a way of earning links.  I would not listen to them.

We tell infringers to take our content down and when they don't comply we either submit DMCA to Google, their revenue source and their hosting - or we have an attorney send them notice.    We are sending out three notices today.

A lot of webmasters have tried to produce stars but have never received them or have seldom received them - even on pages where a reasonable person would think that stars should appear.

Why?  I believe that a person who tries to force stars by plastering schema markup all over the website - and specifically on pages that do not meet the criteria for receiving stars - will be denied stars across the website.   Simply stated.... I think that there is such a thing as spamming schema and Google doesn't like it.

Disclaimer... I don't know how anyone would prove the above unless they could get Google to say that it is true.

I spend much of my time improving articles on a long-established site.  Most of these articles are already long - 1000 to 3000 words - with multiple images.

The improvements are usually adding a new section to beef up the length and give the article relevance to a new suite of keywords or make it relevant to topics in the recent news.   Do these help the rankings?   If the site is already near the top of the first page for the root query, it usually doesn't.  If it is deep in the SERPs at position 50 to 90 it usually does.

Regardless of how the ranking for the root keyword changes, these improvements often increase the traffic - because they expose the site to new keywords.

but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.

If you do a good job of this, I think you will get more traffic, and it might be a better result that moving the rankings up.

If you are going to split part of the site off,  the auto makes the most sense since it is local.  Usually local is much easier to rank for than national, but that depends upon the competition in your geographic and product areas.

To become visible in the SERPs, and to make money from those rankings, requires a lot of work.   If you split your time between multiple sites a lot more time will be required to bring any of your sites into money-making rankings.

So, until you have a site that is dominant in its SERPs, the best use of your time is probably to spend all of your energy and resources into a single site.

Once you have a site that is dominant in your niche, you can then afford a second site - and use the original site to give it a few links and get it ranking.

I think that Google knows what (keywords) your articles are about - so there is less need to stuff them into a title tag.

However, matching the keyword to what the searcher has in mind and will see bolded in the SERPs is still important.

"providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results"

Exactly.  You need to stand out.  Show that your content or product has special value, inspire the searcher to click on your page.  I believe that title tags can move rankings if you can get the visitor to click and hold them after they land.

I still think that there is no problem with having title tags that match your H1 tags.

Ten years ago, I wrote title tags that focused on keywords.  Now I am writing title tags that focus more on presenting something interesting from the article that might elicit clicks.   A lot of the old title tags remain on the site but I revisit them every time I update or rewrite a page.

I generally agree with George and Nicholas.

I also think that the strength of your site vs the strength of the competition is important - along with the difficulty of the keywords.

If you are going after long tail keywords against weaker competition, then six shorter content pages targeting six different keywords would be best.  However, if the competition is strong and the keywords difficult then one big kickass page will have the best chance.

Finally, presenting one comprehensive article with all of your text and photos on one page is better for link-earning than breaking it up into six short pages.

This is a complex question asked simply.  We could also consider the ad impression opportunity of getting the visitor to click through six pages.

Writing very generous product descriptions can answer questions for the buyer.  They can facilitate the buying decision or prevent purchase of items that are poor fits for the shopper - and thereby reduce returns.