How to deal with messy backend without subfolders

Say that I had 20-25 pages listed under a subfolder called "/pages". For SEO purposes, I'd like to get rid of this folder. That way, site crawlers can easily crawl the priority keyword that falls later in the URL (Ie: /pages/data-integration).

Understandably, this could cause a messy situation in the backend. Does anyone have any recommendations to help keep files a bit more organized besides putting them in a subfolder?

Thanks so much for your help!