Content in an important factor in website optimization. A good content helps to build your keyword ranking higher in search engines. Backlinks are also important for keyword ranking and helps in driving good traffic from various external webpages.
Both content and backlinks are important for any website, quality content will help in getting good ranking of your keywords whereas backlinks help you to increase the site linking and getting traffic to your site.
Good and unique content is still the greatest way for you to reach this. To get better web traffic for your website, off page optimization is very important.
Both content and backlinks are important for SEO but unique content must be important of SEO because the content is king and unique content will help you improve the keyword position in search engine.