Which domain should I scan?

Enter the domain your customers actually visit. A few cases are worth getting right first time, because each variant is scanned and stored as its own report.

www or not

Use whichever your site actually serves. If typing example.com lands you on www.example.com, scan the www form — that is your real site.

Scanning the version that only redirects gives a report about a redirect.

Subdomains are separate sites

example.com and shop.example.com are analysed independently, because search engines treat them independently too.

If your store is on a subdomain and your content on the root, they need separate scans, and their scores are not comparable.

Not a staging site

A staging or password-protected site is usually blocked from crawling, which is correct for staging and useless for an audit — you will get a report about a login page.

Not a single page

The audit is a site-level analysis. Enter the domain, not a deep URL.

For one specific page, a tool is the right instrument — the library has page-level checkers. See Finding the right tool.

If the report looks wrong

Check what you actually scanned before concluding the audit is inaccurate. A surprisingly low score is most often a scan of the wrong variant — a redirecting domain, a staging host, or a subdomain with almost nothing on it.

Next: open your site in a browser, copy the address bar exactly, and scan that.