A well-designed site with no content is like a shop with no window display. Google has nothing to rank. Customers have nothing to find.
The majority of small business websites have five or six generic pages — Home, About, Services, Contact — and nothing else. No blog, no guides, no long-form service pages, no location content. This means Google has almost nothing to index beyond your homepage, and you're invisible for every search query that isn't your exact business name.
Meanwhile, your competitors who publish regular, well-optimised content are quietly accumulating search rankings, backlinks, and topical authority. Every piece of content they publish is an additional entry point for customers to find them — and one more reason Google trusts their site over yours.
Content marketing is not optional for businesses that want organic traffic. It's the mechanism by which search engines decide who is the authority in a given topic — and it's how customers find you at the exact moment they're looking for what you offer.