There's a specific kind of discouraged that only happens after you've published 20 pages and gotten exactly zero clicks for any of them. Not bad clicks, not low-converting clicks — zero. Google just hadn't decided the site existed yet.
I want to be honest about this part because most "how I built a successful site" posts skip straight to the part where it worked. The actual middle of building something is mostly this: you did the work, and nothing happened yet, and you don't know if that means "keep going" or "this isn't it."
What actually got me through it wasn't a growth hack. It was going back and checking whether the content itself was still good — not the traffic, the content. Would I personally trust this page if I found it? For a couple of the early pages, honestly, no. They were thin. I rewrote them instead of publishing more new ones, and that's roughly when things started moving.
I don't think "just make it better" is a satisfying answer. But it's the true one, more often than the growth-hack version.