With the competition around, without keywords research ranking in Google is possible, but ranking in no 1 page is close to impossible. Proper keyword research using several tools in the market is vital to determine which keywords your business should be targeting.

In general, you can always follow this.
1) List down all the keywords associated with your brand
2 Use tools like SEMRush/Ahrefs/uber suggest to find out the search volume of those keywords.
3) If you find teh search volume of those keywords high enough, you can always start using them.
I follow kuware.com for Marketing related info. Hope this helps

You can write content to rank, but when you write you need a set of keywords that will be the focus of that piece of content. It can be a question or a long tail keyword or a specific keyword like "social media".

But always keep in mind, each and every keyword has competition that you can check with the keyword planner.

Long-tail keywords have low competition and low search volume, but those who search using long-tail keywords or a question, are doing it with an intention.

If you write a piece of content around that keyword, and the searcher finds value in it, your content will start moving up the rank.

For example "What are long-tail keywords?" is a search that will have lower volume and competition compared to long-tail keywords.

So basically yes you need keywords to rank in the search engine, and moving ahead with long-tail keywords will be more effective. Because voice searches are becoming more popular.