AnalyticsSEO. You can connect GA and GWT for a ton of added metrics to monitor and report on, which can provide you some cool stuff at a quick glance, or as in depth as you want. For example, on my dashboard for each individual site, I can see a quick and easy few numbers on how many new inbound links I've gotten over the past couple of weeks. One could, for example, at a quick glance, figure out if they're drip feeding properly. If, for example you've outsourced linkbuilding, and they say they're drip feeding, but you see a several hundred percent increase in IBL, that may be a pretty good indicator that they either aren't really drip feeding, or something is up and things are getting indexed immediately which may or may not be detrimental for that particular site. Just one of the many things I've found that you can do with their metrics. I used to use Raven, and liked it a lot for what it did and their GUI layout, but we moved to AnalyticsSEO after Raven dropped rank tracking. So far, in the past 4 months I haven't had any issues.
Just recently got the Enterprise SEO Powersuite. Haven't played around with it nearly enough, but so far I'm very impressed. Probably one of the most important, yet often overlooked, aspect of SEO is efficient time management. Already, I can see this software suite offers some serious improvements in time management for a great many things. What may have taken me a few days or a week to perform a comprehensive site audit in the past, you can do (for the most part, or at least 50-75% of the metrics that you normally do) a majority of that in just a few minutes with this program, and have very professional looking, personally branded and customer branded reports with a couple clicks of the mouse. It may not cover all of your bases, and plenty of sites may require getting outside of the box and using uncommon or unconventional metrics to properly audit and describe something, however this software seems to be able to definitely simplify most of the common stuff you normally would do. Time saved + Increased Efficiency = More $$$
For certain keywords (usually high competition type stuff), I just manually check on Chrome with an incognito window. Most rank tracking software usually has a ~1 week lag in terms of when rank is tracked. Some high competition keywords are changing by the day, sometimes multiple times per day (the most I have personally seen is a ranking fluctuation twice in one day). This would be the most accurate way for that.
)
