The short answer is yes. If the PDF pages are created in a standard word processor then Google can index the pages and rank them like any other web page.
In fact there are search engines just for PDF documents.
Go to this site [ http://www.pdfsearchengine.org/ ], and do a search on a product or service in your industry and you will be amazed what comes up.
Google sees the text in PDF documents just like text on a web page. This means your PDF documents can get indexed, it can get searched and it can rank for your target search terms.
For example, do a search on corporate brochure and see what gets listed. You may find some good ideas for your brochure redesign 🙂
The other thing to consider is that live links in the PDF documents also pass on PageRank.
One way of exploiting this fact is to use a PDF whitepaper with a link from a relevant page on Wikipedia or other resource site.
The steps are:
1. Write a white paper (not a sales pitch), about your topic of interest.
2. Put a link in the footer of your whitepaper to one of your web pages.
3. Upload the PDF document to your web server – make sure it can be seen by Google.
4. Find a relevant high PageRank page on Wikipedia and put a link in the references section of the Wikipedia article.
If the whitepaper is genuinely useful, it will stay as a link on the Wikipedia page. Hopefully this link will pass on PageRank through the PDF to your web pages. It may also generate traffic.
