Google has placed importance on responsive design because it improves user experience and therefore more users visit the site and stay on the site longer. In turn this raises the sites ranking in Google. Your site content still needs to be good for you to rank in Google. Making a poorly ranking site responsive will not see much benefit. Google has stated that it will be more favorable to responsive and user friendly sites than those that are not.

Article: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/

Site Test: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly

Feel free to message me if you have more questions.