Google's algo still wants backlinks, the correlation between ranking page 1 and having a domain/URLs with a diverse set of backlinks from multiple trustworthy domains is probably never going away but paying for backlinks is harder now than 10 years ago and personally I prefer whitehat backlink building approaches and yes that should 100% be part of the strategy... your agent should always be thinking not only about producing good content but increasing the odds that people will link to that good content