In short, yes. Google favors high-quality content that's fresh and well-optimized over poorly written or purely duplicated content.
Before publishing any piece of content, you should make sure it's targeting the long-tail keywords and specific phrases you want to rank for, with plenty of content to help it show up on the first page of results. Don't settle for short content that hardly touches on a specific topic. If you have enough information, be as detailed as possible while including naturally implemented keywords within headers and the body.
Google doesn't rank content that seems poorly constructed or half-hearted, particularly if a certain topic has been covered extensively enough by competitors. If you don't pour your heart into your website's content, Google will be able to detect that and favor the other websites ranking against yours.
In fact, high-quality content is arguably the most vital element of an effective SEO campaign, and Google continues to place a higher emphasis on quality content rather than quantity or over-optimization. The more effort you put into content development, the higher your rankings are likely to be.