Blog Sidebar & SEO Question!

Hi SEO folks!

My website (offers a software product to marketers) has a blog with over 1000+ posts. Similar to a lot of blogs, the articles on the blog homepage are published in chronological order hence the most recent post shows on the top but we are not displaying our most popular posts so no one can access them unless they come via organic search. Also, the blog is paginated over 200+ pages with each page containing 10 posts.

The blog homepage doesn't have any static links to the blog categories but the articles published on the blog homepage links to respective category which the post belongs too.

There is a sidebar on the right hand side with subscription form which is generating a couple of blog subscriptions each month consistently.

I am thinking of adding a couple of top categories and popular posts in the right sidebar only on the blog homepage and paginated pages but not on the individual blogpost landing pages.

So my questions are:

1. Do you think this might help in terms of SEO such as helping in frequent crawling of the posts in each category as well as boost our popular posts if we link them to bloghome.
2. What KPIs can I use to measure the performance after this implementation as I know it might not actually boost traffic that much but does having static links to popular posts and easy access to posts in each category in blog home page would add any authority in the eyes of Google that I can track somehow?