does crawling in seo matter for a small site?

Not in the crawl budget sense, no - that's a big-site problem, google itself says sites with a few thousand pages or less mostly don't need to think about it. What does matter is that google can crawl your pages at all: nothing important blocked in robots.txt, no accidental noindex, and every page linked from somewhere on the site so it isn't orphaned. Submit a sitemap in search console and glance at the pages report now and then.