When optimising a website for the search engines, the best measurement of success is traffic. Rankings are a means to an end. Sometimes you might find yourself in a position where your rankings are good, but your traffic is quite poor. There are several reasons why this might happen.

Localised results

For a lot of searches, particularly business-related searches, results shown by Google are personalised according to locality. At the broadest level, results from google.com and google.co.uk will be different, but results within google.co.uk will also differ depending on your exact location.

If you search for cinema listings, Google will tailor results so that you see start times at cinemas near where you live. If you search for a plumber, the same applies and you are also likely to see different sponsored results as well, as these are also geo-targeted.

Personalised results

Are you signed into your Google account? Are you? This will make a massive difference to the results you see.