On a large site, crawl budget and pagination matter. On a plumber’s site with 18 URLs, the failure mode is simpler: a service page exists, sits in no menu, and is never mentioned in a guide. Googlebot might find it in a sitemap. It still looks unloved, and users never reach it.
Make a hub, not a haystack
Homepage → three service pages → two or three guides that link back to the matching service. That is a site architecture. Random posts that only live in “latest” will age out of the homepage and become orphans.
Write the anchor
“Click here” wastes the strongest on-page hint you have. “Emergency boiler repair in Leeds” tells both humans and Google what sits on the other side. Use the phrase you want that destination to rank for — once, naturally.
Related blocks are fine if they are real
Three related guides that share a tag beat an automated “you may also like” that points at the cookie policy. If you cannot name why two URLs are related, do not link them.
Measure it
The SEO checker flags thin internal linking on a single URL. It cannot map the whole site. For that, click from your homepage like a stranger: if you cannot reach pricing, the core service, and one guide without using search, neither can a crawler that starts at /.