Yes backlinks are important as they help to build trust of your domain in search engines. They also generate good traffic from external sources and rank keywords higher in search engines.
backlinks are a very important aspect of off-page SEO. backlinks tell search engine bots to follow the webpage, when this happens, search bots will push up your site in the search algorithm. The more backlinks your site gets, the better will be your rank. backlinks are of two types, no-follow and do-follow. You need to build do-follow backlinks.