Confirm you are looking at the right property
A domain property and a URL-prefix property do not show the same set of pages. If both www and non-www, or http and https, still respond, you may be reading a slice of the site. Pick the version you want indexed, redirect the others, and verify the property that matches.
Access should sit with the business. An agency login as the only owner is a risk when the engagement ends. Add the people who need it, and keep one owner inside the company.
Performance, then coverage
The performance report is a list of queries and pages, with impressions, clicks, and average position. Average position is an average, so a page can look “ranked” while most of its queries are not where you hoped. Sort by impressions to find topics people already see you for, and sort by pages to find URLs that receive attention but few clicks.
The pages or indexing report tells you what Google did with a URL. Excluded does not always mean broken. A page you deliberately left out should be excluded. A service page you care about should not be. Open the examples and fix the specific reason, rather than requesting indexing for the whole site every day.
A small monthly habit
Once a month is enough for most businesses: check new coverage issues, look at the queries that grew or dropped, and note any manual actions or security issues. Security and manual actions are rare and should be handled immediately if they appear.
Export or screenshot the view you use so the next month is comparable. Changing the date range and the filters every time makes every meeting feel like a new crisis.
This starter guide was written for the Nerix insights library. It should be updated when the advice changes. It is not a client story and it does not report results.