Remove Keywords From Webpage But Still Use for SEO

Question

We have several pages that have vehicle names that include the new/current vehicle name as a page title and also H1. And the paragraph content mentions what the name of the vehicle used to be called. Example: ACME Truck formerly XYZ Truck. This is all because of our company buying out other companies, but we wanted people to know what the new name of a vehicle is and what the vehicle used to be called.

We now want to remove the old vehicle name from the content.

Is there a way to still reference the old vehicle name for SEO purposes in case someone searched for it in Google, and still be able to find the related vehicle page that will now only mention the new vehicle name in the page content and title?

I have thought about adding the old vehicle name in the meta description, but wanted to ask and see if anyone else had a better suggestion?

We use WordPress Yoast Plugin, but maybe there would be a good Schema plugin to use for this type of scenario.

Answer 1

You will need to add meta content containing the old keywords, in order to be found. IF you override the old keywords and meta data, it will eventually crawl using just the new words. The key areas are - content, meta-description, title and alt tags. You can leave the old words in, but this means you are using limited meta data space to reference the old ones, which seems like not good practice.

My suggestion would be to add the old keywords to the page tags and leave the rest of the meta data concentrated on the new and active products.