Should I link G+ and social accounts to internal pages?

[Wayne76]

Hi Gang,

We are a multi-state law firm (Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico) that is looking to increase ranking for Michigan and New Mexico for 2015. (Michigan and New Mexico used to exist as subdomains under 2keller.com but have now been incorporated as pages under the main domain.)

The question is whether or not we link directly to what we call the "main state pages" from various accounts like G+, FB, Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.?

For example, should we link from our New Mexcio G+ page to our New Mexico main page, or should it be linked to the main domain at 2keller.com where our general branding is on display?

I seem to remember somewhere seeing a Whiteboard Friday or some other forum in which Rand had spoke to something similar. I believe he advised AGAINST trying to control the "user experience" for instances like these, but I can't locate same.

I understand that clients/customers are looking for our main brand, but it would seem to be the better experience to get users in state specific locales to their state specific page. Am I thinking wrong about this?

Thanks in advance!

Wayne

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Wayne!

The WB Friday you're referencing isn't ringing an immediate bell with me, but as to your question, what RangeMarketing has mentioned would be standard Local SEO advice. Provided your location landing pages are of high quality (not thin or duplicative) and feature all of the info the customer needs to understand your services and contact you, then yes, it is considered a best practice to use these URLs in your citation building. Additionally, these types of landing page URLs for your various physical locations may help reduce the risk of Google merging your listings on their end, because the URL is one of the signals differentiating the various locations. Hope this helps!

[RangeMarketing]

Hi Wayne,

When dealing with multiple locations, it's best to link location specific Google+ pages to the location pages you have set up on your website.

Laura had great answer for a similar question here: http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-best-use-schema-tags-for-multiple-locations

Hope this helps!