Google uses +200 rankings signals to determine where a page should be ranked in search results. They do this to avoid low quality, spammy, and irrelevant pages from making it to the top of results.
As you optimize a website for search engines seeking increased organic search traffic, it’s in your best interest to provide as many “signals” to them that you are a legitimate brand, you are trustworthy, and that you have something to offer that no one else does. All in all, SEO boils down to two concepts:
Popularity
It means your target audience is talking about you on the web. This is normally measured through reviews, backlinks, brand mentions, social media engagement, press, etc. This cannot be faked, but there are ways to naturally influence these signals to benefit your SEO efforts.
Relevance
This speaks to content associated with your brand. Think of this as the context in which your brand exists. You have almost full control over the relevance, as the content that exists on the website plays a huge role and by far the most impactful as you cannot be “popular” without content.
Importance of Content
Google can struggle to read images or video the same way that humans can, so they introduced the “alt text” image meta tag to help them understand the context of an image. By having website owners describe that image in a short sentence (great place to add images), it can help them evaluate how these fit in within your pages. In the same way, having text transcription of video content can help them better understand your media.
In other words, people enter text queries into a search engine and Google does its best job to return pages that contain information that answers the query.
There are rarely “universal” truths in SEO, but having content is one of the most important requirements in order to perform better in Google Search. Not only on the pages you want to surface, but also via supporting pages.