The 5HITS

Competition minister Craig Emerson it appears has decided that competition is not such a great thing and out an end to the new Choice Grocery website, which was due to go live next week. Read the full article on News and The Australian, or maybe there is more to it and we the citizens are not considered sophisticated enough to understand why anything that will help manage duopolies and potentially keep prices down should be a good thing.

This was a well funded website, with good resources involved. The first effort is reported to have cost around $6m before being canned and the Choice Grocery, to date reported at $7m of the $13m. With 1 week to go before the site goes live, why would you cancel such project? The only possible reasons maybe:

• The supermarket lobbyists are a lot more convincing than we might think
• The supermarkets can bring a lot more pressure to Government that we might think
• Some powerful people out there really do not want any sort of spot light brought onto grocery prices
• The site was really really bad, $7m how bad can it be?

According to Livenews, they just come out and say it. Pressure from the big supermarkets is believed to have caused the Government to abandon their election promises and admit the site is not feasible. Seven million dollars later…

Choice was not told direct and Mr Emerson communicated the news after meeting with Grocery retailers. Hang on a second. if this is correct, he decided this was not feasible with the very people it is meant to manage and potentially cause to reduce their prices and profits. So the players decided the aims of the site which is being developed by an independent part, being the trusted consumer brand Choice, were not feasible. There just has to be something wrong with that picture, I cannot put my finger on it right now though.

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Search Engine rankings and value

Search engines allow users to find products, services or information. This is also known as search based intent. Given search engines are around 24% of traffic to websites on average (Hitwise) this is valuable traffic to most websites.

Organic search engine rankings cannot be bought but rely on the quality of your website, website content and linking. To rank well for competitive terms can take some investment not only in internal resources but also external search engine optimisation consultants.

The potential return on this investment is high, as high search engine rankings for popular keywords will drive trafficwith the potnetial to convert. Search engine rankings thus have a value to the organisation. Not only do they provide ongoing traffic and potential customers, they also assist in the organisational branding and visibility, as good search engine rankings usually perceived as belonging to quality websites and organisations.

As with any asset, to maintain high search engine rankings requires maintenance. Like any asset, the rankings can be impacted by internal constraints, competitors and search engine algorithms. As with assets, they can become obsolete, damaged or destroyed by “Acts of God” or search engines.

So undeniably, there is effort, cost and knowledge development from which an asset results, which also results in ongoing benefits to the organisation. The asset, being search engine rankings and the ongoing benefit being traffic to the organisation website. So should the cost of achieving high search engine rankings be capitalised and considered as an asset in an entity’s balance sheet.

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